South Korea's experimental novelist Han Kang wins 2024 Nobel literature
Adds descriptions of work in paragraphs 12-18
Han Kang's work explores historical traumas and human fragility
First South Korean to win Nobel literature prize
Novel 'The Vegetarian' was major international breakthrough
Swedish Academy cites 'intense poetic prose'
Prize worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million)
By Simon Johnson, Justyna Pawlak
STOCKHOLM, Oct 10 (Reuters) -South Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for "her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life", the award-giving body said on Thursday.
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
"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," Anders Olsson, chairman of the Academy's Nobel Committee, said in a statement.
Han Kang, the first South Korean and the 18th woman to win the literature prize, began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine Literature and Society, while her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection "Love of Yeosu".
Born in 1970, she comes from a literary background, her father being a well-regarded novelist.
Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction for her novel "The Vegetarian" in 2016, the first of her novels to be translated into English and regarded as her major international breakthrough.
Bookmakers' favourites ahead of the announcement had included Chinese writer Can Xue and many other perennial possible candidates such as Kenya's Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Australia's Gerald Murnane and Canada's Anne Carson.
Han Kang had not been widely backed, though South Korean poet Ko Un has been regularly tipped to win the prize in recent years and was again among those seen as in with a chance.
"I was able to talk to Han Kang over the phone," Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy told a news conference. "She was having an ordinary day, it seems, she had just finished supper with her son," he said.
'THE VEGETARIAN'
In "The Vegetarian", after struggling with gruesome recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife, rebels against societal norms, forsaking meat and stirring concern among her family that she is mentally ill.
"She is exploited erotically and aesthetically by her brother-in-law, a video artist who becomes obsessed with her passive body (and) ... sinks ever deeper into a psychosis-like condition expressed through the 'flaming trees', a symbol for a plant kingdom that is as enticing as it is dangerous," according to the Academy's description.
In an interview with the Booker Prizes published last year, Han Kang described how the writing of "The Vegetarian" had been a difficult period in her life where she questioned whether should be able to finish the novel or even survive as an author.
"I was suffering from severe arthritis in my fingers, so I wrote the first two parts at a leisurely pace, using a felt-tip pen that glided smoothly across the paper, and then typed out the last part holding two ballpoint pens upside down," she said.
"To this day, I feel awkward when I hear about the novel's ‘success'."
HISTORICAL TRAUMA
Her focus on historical trauma is explored the novel "Human Acts" through a 1980 massacre of hundreds of students and unarmed civilians by the South Korean military in the city of Gwangju, where she herself grew up.
"In seeking to give voice to the victims of history, the book confronts this episode with brutal actualization and, in so doing, approaches the genre of witness literature," the Academy said.
In "We Do Not Part", her latest novel due to be published in English in 2025, Han Kang "conveys the power of the past over the present".
Two of her books have been made into films; "The Vegetarian" in 2009, directed by Lim Woo-Seong, and 2011's "Scars", by the same director.
The Nobel prizes were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and began in 1901.
The literature prize is the most accessible of the Nobels for many and, as such, the Academy's choices are met with praise and criticism, often in equal measure.
The Academy's omission of literary giants such as Russia's Leo Tolstoy, France's Emile Zola and Ireland's James Joyce has left many book-lovers scratching their heads over the last century.
The 2016 prize award to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was hailed as radical rethink about what literature is, but also seen as a snub to authors in more traditional genres.
Even so, the prize money and a place on a list that includes luminaries such as Irish poet W.B. Yeats, who won in 1923, American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who took the award in 1954, and Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner in 1982, is an appealing proposition.
($1 = 10.3978 Swedish crowns)
Nobel laureates https://www.reuters.com/graphics/NOBEL-PRIZE/010050ZC27H/
Reporting by Niklas Pollard, Simon Johnson and Johan Ahlander in Stockholm and Justyna Pawlak in Warsaw; additional reporting by Terje Solsvik in Oslo; Editing by Alex Richardson
免责声明: XM Group仅提供在线交易平台的执行服务和访问权限，并允许个人查看和/或使用网站或网站所提供的内容，但无意进行任何更改或扩展，也不会更改或扩展其服务和访问权限。所有访问和使用权限，将受下列条款与条例约束：(i) 条款与条例；(ii) 风险提示；以及(iii) 完整免责声明。请注意，网站所提供的所有讯息，仅限一般资讯用途。此外，XM所有在线交易平台的内容并不构成，也不能被用于任何未经授权的金融市场交易邀约和/或邀请。金融市场交易对于您的投资资本含有重大风险。
所有在线交易平台所发布的资料，仅适用于教育/资讯类用途，不包含也不应被视为用于金融、投资税或交易相关咨询和建议，或是交易价格纪录，或是任何金融商品或非应邀途径的金融相关优惠的交易邀约或邀请。
本网站上由XM和第三方供应商所提供的所有内容，包括意见、新闻、研究、分析、价格、其他资讯和第三方网站链接，皆保持不变，并作为一般市场评论所提供，而非投资性建议。所有在线交易平台所发布的资料，仅适用于教育/资讯类用途，不包含也不应被视为适用于金融、投资税或交易相关咨询和建议，或是交易价格纪录，或是任何金融商品或非应邀途径的金融相关优惠的交易邀约或邀请。请确保您已阅读并完全理解，XM非独立投资研究提示和风险提示相关资讯，更多详情请点击 这里。
