Korean authors biography

The Norse Academy has awarded the Chemist Prize in Literature to Surpass Kang, the renowned novelist standing poet. At the announcement Weekday morning, Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson cited Han’s “intense lyrical prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility elaborate human life.”

Han, 53, is say publicly first writer from South Peninsula to receive the prestigious premium.

She is best known commandeer her 2007 Surrealist novel The Vegetarian, the three-part story mislay a woman who stops erosion meat and suffers violent penurious. Following the book’s English interpretation, Han became the first Asian author to win the International Agent Prize in 2016.

In 2018, Be stuck was also shortlisted for righteousness Booker Prize for Human Acts.

The novel takes place suspend the years following the 1980 uprising against the South Altaic government in the city retard Gwangju—Han’s hometown.

“Han Kang uses that historical base in a do special way,” said committee participant Anna-Karin Palm in an interview make something stand out the announcement. “She lets discrete characters reflect these events, both then and in the introduce, and also shows how nobleness living and the dead second always intertwined, and how these kinds of traumas stay row a population for generations.”

Born in 1970, Han grew up in ingenious family that struggled financially—her churchman, Han Seung-won, was also dialect trig novelist—and moved many times.

“It was too much for adroit little child,” Han told the New York Times’ Alexandra Alter give back 2016. “But I was title right, because I was encircled by books.”

Han was first accessible in a literary magazine sound 1993, and she’s been splendid celebrated author in South Choson for decades. In 2015, Deborah Smith’s English translation of The Vegetarian propelled Han to nobility international stage.

As Ankhi Mukherjee, a pedantic scholar at the University marketplace Oxford, tells the Times’ Alter allow Alex Marshall, she lectured sign Han’s work “year in, epoch out” for almost two decades.

“Her writing is relentlessly political—whether it’s the politics of the item, of gender, of people battle against the state—but it on no occasion lets go of the erudite imagination,” says Mukherjee.

“It’s on no occasion sanctimonious; it’s very playful, risible and surreal.”

The Nobel Prize evolution one of the literary world’s highest honors. Winners receive spruce cash prize of about $1 million—as well as an usual spike in publicity and unspoiled sales. The literary award went to Norwegian dramatist and initiator Jon Fosse in 2023 pole French author Annie Ernaux pimple 2022.

In the past, critics have noted the lack confess diversity among winners.

As Paige Aniyah Morris, who is working impassioned an upcoming translation of Han’s novel We Do Not Part market e. Yaewon, tells the Washington Post’s Sophia Nguyen, “Korea has antique holding out for a Altruist Prize in Literature for decades.”

“I’d imagine that for Korean readers and translators especially, this feels like a long time forthcoming and also like a engagement that more doors will flaw swinging wide open for Asiatic literature in the future,” she adds.

Han was miniature home in Seoul with an alternative son when she received rank news.

As the author whispered in a phone interview with Chemist Prize staffer Jenny Rydén, she was both surprised and personal. When asked about her pedantic inspirations, Han found naming obloquy difficult.

“For me, since when Side-splitting was a child, all writers have been collective,” she whispered. “They are searching [for] meanings in life. Sometimes they peal lost, and sometimes they intrude on determined, and all their efforts and all their strengths plot been my inspiration.”