South Korean writer Han Kang has won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. The 53-year-old author won the prize for her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and highlights the fragility of human life".
She is the first South Korean writer and the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Swedish Academy's secretary said she had managed to speak to Han Kang, who was having dinner with her son at the end of a typical day, before the announcement of the prize. The writer said she was very surprised by the news and had not expected to win the prize. She was not preparing for a big celebration, saying in the interview that she would have tea with her son and spend the evening quietly.
Her international breakthrough came with her book, The Vegetarian, which was her first novel to be published in English and won the International Man Booker Prize in 2016. In the three-part book, which was made into a film in South Korea in 2009, the protagonist decides to stop eating meat, which has serious consequences for his life, MTI reported.
His novel Human Acts, which was also published in Hungarian and recalled the killing of pro-democracy protesters in Gwangju, was a finalist for the 2018 International Booker Prize.
She also writes novellas, poetry, and novels, and is interested in other arts.
According to his biography presented by the academy, she has a literary background and his father is a well-known novelist. She was born in South Korea in 1970 and lived in Kwangju until 1980 when he and his family moved to Seoul before the uprising, but she has been preoccupied with the events in his hometown since childhood. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University and made her debut as a poet in 1993, aged 23, before publishing his first prose work two years later.
Han Kang's victory was a surprise - the bookmakers had not expected her to be a serious contender. The Swedish Academy has often been attacked for giving preference to European authors when awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature, and last year's Nobel Prize for Literature went to a European author, Jon Fosse of Norway. In addition, only 17 of the 116 times he has been awarded the prize have been to women.
The total Nobel Prize cheque this year is for 11 million (tax-free) Swedish kronor or around 385 million forints.
