Oct 10,2024:The Swedish Academy has awarded the 2024 prize to South Korean writer Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
In awarding the top prize to a 53-year-old Asian writer at the peak of her writing career, the academy has ensured a wider readership of an “innovator in contemporary prose” who with her experimental style has conjured up universal tales of the human condition. With a radical and poetic imagination, she writes about women battling patriarchy, violence, grief and also about historical wrongs and injustices.
Her literary career began with a book of poems but her breakthrough novel was The Vegetarian, first published in Korean in 2007, and translated into English by Deborah Smith in 2015. It immediately scooped up many honours including the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. The story revolves around a woman and the consequences of her decision to give up eating meat, and was expanded from her short story, ‘The Fruit of My Woman’. As the protagonist Yeong-hye defends her radical stand, and small act of independence, her family reacts in extraordinary, violent ways to make her change her mind. The obsessive tale has been compared to Kafka’s nightmarish stories.
Winning the Booker opened the door for her other books, Human Acts, The White Book and Greek Lessons, to be translated into English. Another, We Do Not Part, the story of two women told in the backdrop of a hidden chapter in Korean history, a massacre that happened in the 1940s, is being translated by e. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, and will be published in early 2025.
In its bio-bibliography, the academy says that in We Do Not Part, Han Kang, with “imagery that is as precise as it is condensed, conveys the power of the past over the present,” and also “traces the friends’ unyielding attempts to bring to light what has fallen into collective oblivion and transform their trauma into a joint art project, which lends the book its title.”
In terms of “imagery of pain”, it is closely linked to her 2017 novel, The White Book, which is an “elegy dedicated to the person who could have been the narrative self’s elder sister, but who passed away only a couple of hours after birth.” The story is narrated “in a sequence of short notes, all concerning white objects; it is through this colour of grief that the work as a whole is associatively constructed.”
Han Kang takes on Korean history in another of her novels, Human Acts (2016). Setting the story around a historical event, a massacre undertaken by the South Korean military in 1980 on protesting students and civilians, she seeks “to give voice to the victims of history,” but in an experimental style that is “as visionary as it is succinct.” Her 2023 novel, Greek Lessons (first published in Korean in 2011) is a story of a relationship between two vulnerable individuals, a young woman who has lost the power of speech and her teacher who is losing his power to see. “From their respective flaws, a brittle love affair develops. The book is a beautiful meditation around loss, intimacy and the ultimate conditions of language,” the academy notes.
In her oeuvre, the academy says Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. “She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose,” it contends. But most of all, through her writing, Han Kang has shown the power of literature to “speak the truth.”
The number of translators working on Korean literature has increased dramatically, Han Kang said, after winning the Booker, “a phenomenon that seems to be also closely related to the global success of Korean cinema and pop music.” Several Korean writers have won accolades from the English-speaking world in the past few years from Kim Hyesoon, Bora Chung, Hwang Sok-yong to Cheon Myeong-kwan. Han Kang’s Nobel win will hopefully draw more readers to the rich legacy of the Asian literary world.
