Han Kang

The 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature goes to South Korea

(Bild: APA/AFP/JUNG YEON-JE)

This year's Nobel Prize for Literature goes to the South Korean Han Kang, who is considered the most important voice in Korea, but her books have also been crowned with great success internationally.

The 53-year-old is being honored "for her intense poetic prose, which deals with historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life", according to the Swedish Academy's short citation. Once again, the bookmakers' favorites, the Chinese Can Xue and the Australian Gerald Murnane, came away empty-handed.

"The Vegetarian" (2016)
Han Kang, who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 with her abysmal novel "The Vegetarian", was born on November 27, 1970 in the South Korean provincial capital of Gwangju and grew up in Seoul from the age of eleven. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University in Seoul and first came to prominence with poetry.

Han Kang

(Bild: APA/AFP/JUNG YEON-JE)

"Menschenwerk" (2017)
In her novel "Menschenwerk" (published in German in 2017), the South Korean author deals with a student uprising in 1980, which was met with incomprehensible violence by the military regime at the time. The novel "Deine kalten Hände" (published in German in 2019) deals with women who have an eating disorder, patriarchal power relations and the male view of the female body. In 2020, her book "Weiß" was published in German, in which she mourned her sister, who died immediately after birth and whom she never knew, in poetic condensations and reflections. Most recently, her novel "Greek Lessons" was published this year, in which she tells the story of two ordinary people who meet in a moment of private fear. All five novels have been translated into German and published by Aufbau Verlag

The honorees since 2005

• 2024 Han Kang (South Korea)
• 2023 Jon Fosse (Norway)
• 2022 Annie Ernaux (France)
• 2021 Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania)
• 2020 Louise Glück (USA)
• 2019 Peter Handke (Austria)
• 2018 Olga Tokarczuk (Poland; the prize was made up for in 2019)
• 2017 Kazuo Ishiguro (Great Britain, born in Japan)
• 2016 Bob Dylan (USA)
• 2015 Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus)
• 2014 Patrick Modiano (France)
• 2013 Alice Munro (Canada)
• 2012 Mo Yan (China)
• 2011 Tomas Tranströmer (Sweden)
• 2010 Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
• 2009 Herta Müller (Germany)
• 2008 J.M.G. Le Clézio (France)
• 2007 Doris Lessing (Great Britain)
• 2006 Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
• 2005 Harold Pinter (Great Britain)

The prize is endowed with 970,000 euros
This year's prize is endowed with eleven million Swedish kronor (970,000 euros). Last year, the most prestigious award in the literary world went to the Norwegian Jon Fosse. The award ceremony traditionally takes place on December 10, the anniversary of the death of the founder Alfred Nobel.