Innovative South Korean author Han Kang is worthy of 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature

1 Nov 2024

This year’s choice for the Nobel Prize in Literature has been praised almost unanimously, unlike previous winners.

It’s often the case that when poets write novels, they deliver arrestingly vivid and nimble prose. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007) is a case in point, and it is no doubt the work that was most influential in the Swedish Academy’s decision to award her the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024.

The committee said Han was awarded the prize because her “poetic and experimental style” has made her “an innovator in contemporary prose”.

Han is the first South Korean writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and, in its history of 121 winners over 117 years, only the 18th woman to win it.

She was born in 1970 in Gwangju and has also been awarded the International Booker Prize (in 2016), as well as several other high-profile national and international awards, including the Prix Médicis Etranger in 2023 for her novel Impossible Goodbyes.

The Vegetarian is Han’s best-read work. Published in 2007 and translated into English for publication in the UK in 2015 and the US in 2016, its title was apt, as it coincided with a sudden upsurge in people turning to vegetarianism and veganism, particularly in the UK.

Although the novel is not a manifesto for vegetarianism, it does contemplate the impact of becoming vegetarian when everyone around you eats meat. It conveys protagonist Yeong-hye’s struggle to maintain bodily agency in response to her husband’s disgust at her decision (he sees it as disobedience), her brother-in-law’s erotic fascination with it and her father’s violent acts, force-feeding her pork.

The Vegetarian offers an extended insight into patriarchal control of the female body and has been described as an anticapitalist and ecofeminist revolt.

The novel has a three-part structure and both the narrative perspective and voice shift in each section. Yeong-hye is never a first-person narrator in the story of her own body and the decisions she makes about it.

Han Kang

Reasons for winning

This noticeable lack of voice seems to have been relevant to the Nobel Prize. The committee said their decision was motivated by the author’s commitment to conveying “invisible sets of rules” and “the fragility of human life” through her “unique awareness of the connections between body and soul”.

Han’s poetry and short stories are just as innovative and important as her novels, though they are less well known, and their themes more obscure. Her poetry often explores places (walking on the city street), juxtaposed with objects (streetlamps, candles, mirrors) and the fragmented human body (a hand reaching out, fingertips, frozen cheeks, tongues, eyelids).

Read more: ‘My novels explore human suffering’: Nobel Prize winner Han Kang writes with empathy for vulnerable lives

The English translation of her latest novel, We Do Not Part, will be published in February 2025. We Do Not Part is perhaps more obscure and complex than The Vegetarian, at least in subject matter.

It is the story of a woman named Kyungha, who travels to her friend Inseon’s rural house to care for a pet bird after Inseon is admitted to hospital after a wood-chopping accident. Trapped by a snowstorm, she uncovers letters from the 1948-1949 Jeju massacre, in which about 1,000 people were killed.

Reactions to Han’s win

There has been wide praise for this year’s winner. The Washington Post celebrates the award as offering potential for other Korean writers. The Guardian, meanwhile, acknowledges Han’s accolades and expands on the committee’s reasons for awarding the prize: her empathy, unique awareness, experimental style and her “metaphorically charged prose”.

The prize for literature is often controversial. Online communities debate the validity of winners and make accusations about the politics of choices.

Some commentators are upset if the author is too obscure, as was the case with Norwegian Jon Fosse, who won it in 2023. They are equally upset if the prize is awarded to a figure who is too mainstream, as was the case when Bob Dylan won it in 2016.

The local specificity of Han’s writing, bringing Korean history and places to a global audience, and the precision of her prose mean that her work is innovative and arresting in both form and content. A worthy winner. DM

First published by The Conversation.

Jenni Ramone is an associate professor of postcolonial and global literatures at Nottingham Trent University, England.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

Categories:

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

World

Reasons for winning

Reactions to Han’s win