Award South Korean Han Kang receives the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature

This year's Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Asia - to the author Han Kang from South Korea. This was announced by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on Thursday.

The South Korean author Han Kang will be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. The 52-year-old will receive the world's most prestigious literary prize "for her intense poetic prose, which confronts historical traumas and reveals the fragility of human life", as the Academy's Permanent Secretary, Mats Malm, said at the award ceremony in Stockholm's Old Town.

Han Kang, who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 with her abysmal novel "The Vegetarian", was born on November 27, 1970 in the South Korean provincial capital of Gwangju and grew up in Seoul from the age of eleven. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University in Seoul and first came to prominence with poetry.

In her novel "Menschenwerk" (published in German in 2017), the South Korean author deals with a student uprising in 1980, which was met with incomprehensible violence by the military regime at the time. The novel "Deine kalten Hände" (published in German in 2019) deals with women who have an eating disorder, patriarchal power relations and the male view of the female body.

In 2020, her book "Weiss" was published in German, in which she mourned her sister, who died immediately after giving birth and whom she never knew, in poetic condensations and reflections. Most recently, her novel "Greek Lessons" was published this year, in which she tells the story of two ordinary people who meet in a moment of private fear. All five novels have been translated into German and published by Aufbau Verlag.

18th winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Han Kang is the 18th woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature - and the first woman among the Nobel Prize winners announced so far this year.

Last year, the Nobel Prize for Literature went to the Norwegian Jon Fosse. He was honored for his innovative plays and prose. The year before, the Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux, another great name in world literature, was declared a Nobel Prize winner.

The prestigious Nobel Medals are presented at a ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of the death of prize donor and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). This year's awards are once again endowed with prize money of eleven million Swedish kronor (around 970,000 Swiss francs) per category.