The Swedish Academy announced on Thursday that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to South Korean author Han Kang. It is the first South Korean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
She was awarded “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
Han Kang, the daughter of novelist Han Seung-won, won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 for The Vegetarian, a novel about a woman’s descent into mental illness and neglect from her family. The novel is also one of the first of her books to be translated into English.
She began her published career when five of her poems, including “Winter in Seoul,” were featured in the Winter 1993 issue of the quarterly Literature and Society.
She made her fiction debut in the following year when her short story “The Scarlet Anchor” was the winning entry in the Seoul Shinmun Spring Literary Contest.
Since then, she has gone on to win the Yi Sang Literary Prize (2005), Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. Kang has taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and is currently working on her sixth novel.
Kang has stated that she suffers periodically from migraines, and credits these migraines with “keeping her humble.”
In 2023, she published her fourth full-length novel, Greek Lessons. The Atlantic called it a book in which “words are both insufficient and too powerful to tame.”
Greek writer among frontrunners for the Nobel Prize in Literature
Greek writer Ersi Sotiropoulou was among the favorites to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The World Literature Forum reported she is among the top contenders, recognizing the author’s “lucid exploration of human complexity through ground-breaking prose that examines boundaries between the personal and the political.”
Keeping a low profile, the Greek writer said that this is not the first time in recent years that she has appeared as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.
Sotiropoulou published more than a dozen books of fiction and poetry. Her work has been translated into many languages and has won numerous domestic and international awards.
Two Greek writers have won the Nobel Literature Prize in the past. Giorgos Seferis in 1963 and Odysseas Elytis in 1979.
Nobel Price in Chemistry
On Wednesday Greek Cypriot Demis Hassabis was among the three scientists who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on predicting the structure of proteins using artificial intelligence.
Hassabis was honored with the prestigious ward along with his colleagues David Baker and John Jumper.
While Hassabis and Jumper used artificial intelligence “to predict the structure of almost all known proteins”, Baker “has learned how to master life’s building blocks and create entirely new proteins”.
Demis Hassabis born to a Greek Cypriot father and a Singaporean mother in London was a child prodigy in chess from the age of 4.