South Korean author Han Kang wins the Nobel Prize for literature

STOCKHOLM — South Korean poet and novelist Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for a poetic and unsettling body of work that the Nobel committee said "confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life."

A slow-burning international literary star who has won multiple awards in Korea and Europe, Han is the first Asian woman and the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize. She was awarded for books, including "The Vegetarian" and "Human Acts," that explore the pain of being human and the scars of Korea's turbulent history.

Nobel literature committee member Anna-Karin Palm said Han writes about "trauma, pain and loss," whether individual or collective, "with the same compassion and care." "And this, I think, is something that is quite remarkable," Palm said.

Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised Han's "empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives" of her characters.

"She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead," Olsson said.

Han, 53, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for "The Vegetarian," an unsettling novel in which a woman's decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.

At the time of winning that award, Han said writing novels "is a way of questioning for me."

"I just try to complete my questions through the process of my writing and I try to stay in the questions, sometimes painful, sometimes — well — sometimes demanding," she said.

With "The Vegetarian," she said, "I wanted to question about being human and I wanted to describe a woman who desperately didn't want to belong to the human race any longer."

Han made her publishing debut as a poet in 1993; her first short story collection was published in 1995 and her first novel, "Black Deer," in 1998. Works translated into English include "The Vegetarian," "Greek Lessons," "Human Acts" and "The White Book," a poetic novel that draws on the death of Han's older sister shortly after birth. "The White Book" was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2018.

Her most recent novel, "We Do Not Part," is due to be published in English next year. It confronts a chapter in South Korea's turbulent 20th-century history.

Anders Karlsson, a lecturer at London's School of Oriental and African studies who has translated Han into Swedish, said he was "overjoyed" at the Nobel accolade.

He said Han's "poignant, condensed" prose is able to describe "difficult and dark passages in South Korean history ... in quite open and inviting language that engages and does not deter the reader."

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize. On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

AP