Nobel Prize in literature awarded to Han Kang

Han had just finished dinner with her son when she was reached via phone with news of the award, said Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.

“She wasn’t really prepared for this, but we have begun to discuss preparations for December,” when the awards ceremony will be held, Malm said Thursday at a news conference.

Born to a family of writers in Gwangju, Han made her literary debut in 1993, with five poems in a magazine; she published a collection of short stories two years later. She has won numerous prizes in South Korea, including the Today’s Young Artist Award and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, as well as internationally.

Four of her books have been translated into English. “The Vegetarian,” in which the protagonist’s refusal to eat meat leads her into a surreal physical and psychological journey, as observed by people close to her, won the Booker International Prize in 2016.

Two years later, Han was shortlisted for the same prize for her novel “Human Acts.” A work of historical fiction, it explores the aftermath of the brutally repressed political uprising in Gwangju in 1980. In a review for The Washington Post, Lara Palmqvist wrote that the novel’s chorus of voices included “the innocent and bereaved, academic and imprisoned, those struggling to bear scars from the past, and even that of a disembodied soul.”

“The White Book,” translated into English in 2018, is an autobiographical novel that reflects on grief and the deaths of the author’s mother and an infant sister born before Han. “Greek Lessons,” published in the U.S. in 2023, alternates between perspectives of an ancient-Greek teacher losing his sight and his student, who has lost her ability to speak.

Han’s novel “We Do Not Part” will be published in the United States by Hogarth in January. It explores a dark chapter of Korean history — the massacres on Jeju Island in the late 1940s. Parisa Ebrahimi, who has edited all of Han’s books published by Hogarth, called it her “magnum opus.”

“To publish that book now feels like a real gift, as we’re in our own dark moment of history,” said Ebrahimi, later adding: “The thing that binds her work is curiosity about human nature. All of her books remind us of the fragility of things and also the beauty of things, often through through these dark passages.”

Ebrahimi also noted that Han, 53, had received the Nobel at an unusually young age: “It doesn’t feel like a lifetime achievement award, because in a way, I think she’s at the height of that power.”

The 18-member Swedish Academy chooses the Nobel laureate in literature. Nominations, kept secret for the next 50 years, can be submitted each winter by members of the academy and its peer institutions, past laureates, presidents of literature societies and professors of literature and linguistics. By spring, a smaller committee cuts down the slate to five candidates and sends it to the Academy, which confers throughout the summer and early fall.

“Korea has been holding out for a Nobel Prize in Literature for decades, so this win has already gotten a massive response here,” Paige Aniyah Morris, who is co-translating “We Do Not Part” into English with e. yaewon, wrote in an email to The Post. “I’d imagine that for Korean readers and translators especially, this feels like a long time coming and also like a promise that more doors will be swinging wide open for Korean literature in the future.”

When you read Han’s work, Morris added, “you may not know whether you’re gasping in horror or awe or both.”

Norwegian novelist and playwright Jon Fosse won the 2023 prize, for works that “give voice to the unsayable.” Though the Nobel in literature honors a writer’s total oeuvre and not an individual work, the Academy highlighted his multivolume series “Septology” as his masterwork. Written in a stream of consciousness with no sentence breaks, it was published in the United States by Transit Books.

The 2022 laureate was French writer Annie Ernaux, and in 2021, Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah won the prize.

Nobel winners in physics, medicine and chemistry were announced earlier this week; the Nobel Peace Prize will follow on Friday and the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday.

This story has been updated.