A Korean win: On the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature
A Nobel raises Korean prose to success levels of its drama and music
By awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to South Korean poet and novelist Han Kang this year, the Swedish Academy has done two things. It has looked eastwards, after going with European writers Jon Fosse and Annie Ernaux in the past two years; and it celebrates an “innovator in contemporary prose”. While announcing the name, the academy lauded the 53-year-old writer, the first Korean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. With the human condition as her muse, specifically the question why and how humanity encompasses unspeakable depravity as well as indisputable acts of dignity and kindness, Han Kang has experimented with form and style to tell her stories. Her best-known work available in English is her 2007 novel, The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, and released in 2015. Winning the International Booker Prize in 2016, a decade after it was first published in Korean, the radical story, about a woman who gives up eating meat and finds solidarity only in the plant world, paved the way for her other novels to be translated into English and many other languages. Han Kang, who was born in the South Korean city of Gwangju, moved to Seoul when she was nine years old and studied Korean literature at university.
Growing up amid books — her father is a novelist — she decided to follow in his footsteps but her artistic forays include art and music, which she uses in her narratives and word images. This is evident, for instance, in her 2016 novel, The White Book, where an unnamed narrator talks about grief — the death of an older sister “less than two hours into life” — through white objects including snow, salt, moon-shaped rice cake, fog and breast milk. Her latest novel, We Do Not Part, to be published in English early next year, is the story of a friendship between two women in the backdrop of the 1948 massacre in South Korea’s Jeju Island. A massacre from the 1980s of students and dissenters is also the setting for her most political novel, Human Acts (2016), in which souls of the dead are allowed to “witness their own annihilation”. Ever since the prize was handed out to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in 2016, the academy has been trying to pull itself back to purists. By picking Han Kang, the academy has a winner who, in her experimental style, conveys the power of literature to break barriers. The prize will invariably draw more attention to Korean literature — its dramas, cinema and music have been already ruling the globe ever since South Korean singer Psy burst forth with ‘Gangnam Style’ in 2012.