Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for her intense poetic prose confronting historical traumas and exposing the fragility of human life.
The Swedish Academy announced the award on 10 October 2024. Han Kang is a South Korean novelist and poet, and she became the first South Korean writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her writing frequently examines bodily vulnerability, violence, grief, memory, and the relationship between personal experience and collective history.
Her best-known internationally translated novel, The Vegetarian, won the 2016 International Booker Prize. Other major works include Human Acts, which addresses the 1980 Gwangju uprising, and Greek Lessons. The Nobel citation emphasized both the poetic quality of her prose and its engagement with painful historical realities.
Han Kang is sometimes confused with earlier Nobel laureates who also wrote about trauma or political violence, but the 2024 award was specifically hers. The prize made her the eighteenth woman to win the literature award.