Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: South Korean author Han Kang has been chosen for the award of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” the media reported on Thursday.
The Nobel Prize Committee, on its X handle, said that Kang’s work is “characterized by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking.”
“In Han Kang’s short story (2012; ‘Europa’, 2019), the male narrator, himself masked as a woman, is drawn to an enigmatic woman who has broken away from an impossible marriage. The narrative itself remains silent when asked by his beloved: “If you were able to live as you desire, what would you do with your life?” There is no room here for either fulfillment or atonement,” the Nobel Prize Committee added.
Kang, 53, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for “The Vegetarian,” an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.
Since 1901, a total of 116 Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded. Of these, four have been shared between multiple laureates. So far, 17 women have received this prestigious literature prize.