Official winning image of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature

Stockholm, Sweden, October 10, 2024, 13:00 local time, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature to South Korean writer Han Kang. 2000, Kim Dae-jung won the Nobel Peace Prize, this is the second South Korean to win the Nobel Prize.

Han Kang was born in 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea, where his father and two older brothers were writers. After graduating from Yonsei University, Han devoted herself to writing poetry and novels, and in 1999, she received the Korean Novel Literature Prize for her short story “The Child Buddha”. Since then, she has published Plant Wife (2000), Hyun Deer (2005), and Vegetarian (2007).After 2010, her works include Here Comes the Teenager (2014), White (2016), and her new novel Don't Say Farewell (작별하지 않는 다), which is due to be published in 2021.

Han Kang is currently a professor at the Department of Literary and Creative Arts at the Korea National University of Arts, and one of the most internationally influential writers in contemporary Korean literature. She has been honored with the Seoul Newspaper Annual Spring Literary Award, the Korean Fiction Literary Award, the Young Artist of the Day Award, the Dongri Literary Award, the Lee Box Literary Award, and the Manhae Literary Award, among others. Her works look back at the sadness and trauma of life from a more rooted level, with pen and ink obsessively baring the scars and full of the power of exploration.

On May 16th, 2016, the Booker International Literary Award was announced in London. With her novel “The Vegetarian”, Han Jiang beat 154 masterpieces, including Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk's new novel “The Strange Thing Inside My Head”, Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe's late masterpiece “The Water is Dead”, and the final installment of the bestselling “Naples Quartet”, “The Missing Child”, to become the first Asian author to be awarded the prize in history. In 2017, she was awarded the Marapatti Prize for Literature, the “Italian Nobel Prize for Literature.” In 2018, she was shortlisted again for the Booker International Literary Prize for her work White, and in the same year, she was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Prize for her work Here Comes the Teenager, a record year. 2019 will see the prestigious American magazine Wired awarding the prize to the author of the first book in the history of the Prize, The Water Dies. leading magazine Wired named The Vegetarian among the 10 best genre novels of the decade, along with Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant and Liu Cixin's Three Bodies.

The National Central Library of Korea analyzed lending data from January 2017 to April 2020 for 845 libraries across the country. The results showed that Han Kang's The Vegetarian surpassed topical books such as Kim Ji-young '82, and was second only to Unchained in terms of borrowing rate.