The 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature crowns Han Kang, a first for South Korea

One man, one woman. One woman, one man. Every year since the Nobel sexual and financial scandals, the jury for the most prestigious literary prize in the world alternates between male and female authors. In 2023, he chose Jon Fosse, so logic dictated that this year, he would award his reward to an author. And it is now done. At 1 p.m., the Swedish Academy announced, from the small platform of the Svenska Akademien, the name of the South Korean Han Kang.

« Han Kang’s work is characterized by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental torment and physical torment closely linked to Eastern thought, wrote the Institution. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and, in her poetic and experimental style, she has become an innovator of contemporary prose.”

The first South Korean author

At 53, she became the eighteenth woman out of 116 Nobel Prize winners in literature to receive the prize. She is the first South Korean author to obtain this distinction. In doing so, Han Kang thwarts the predictions of online betting sites. His name was completely absent from the lists, which included the favorites Alexis Wright and his compatriot Gerald Murnane, Mircea Cartarescu, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o or even Thomas Pynchon and Michel Houellebecq.

Han Kang was born in 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea. Daughter of the writer Han Seung-won, little Han grew up surrounded by books. “For me, they were half-living beings who were constantly multiplying and expanding their boundaries,” she told the Guardian last year. As a teenager, she devoured Astrid Lindgren, Pasternak, Dostoyevsky… And undoubtedly, this early companionship made her want to write.

Kang began her literary career as a poet and then published her first novel at the age of 24. It is The Vegetarian, (Feathered Serpent, 2007) and crowned by the International Booker Prize which made him known on the international literary scene. She is the author of ten novels. In France, its publishers include Le Serpent à plumes, Zulma and Grasset. His latest novel, Impossible goodbyes, received the Foreign Medici Prize in 2023. Le Figaro littéraire had noticed it and had these laudatory words: “One thing is certain, it is a book that will not be forgotten and haunts you once closed.”

A new cultural success

With this new attribution, the decidedly cursed names remain, of the Canadian Anne Carson and Margaret Atwood, the Portuguese Antonio Lobo Antunes, the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o and even the Japanese Haruki Murakami. But that’s how it is, the list of unsuccessful candidates continues to grow. There had been Yves Bonnefoy and René Char, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Proust and Aragon, the Italians Italo Svevo, Pier Paolo Pasolini and, from now on, there will be Don DeLillo (87 years old), Stephen King (77 years old). ) or even Joyce Carol Oates (86 years old), whose name was first mentioned on the list of favorites in 1979!

In 2023, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse “for his innovative plays and prose that gave voice to the unspeakable.” In 2022, it was the French novelist Annie Ernaux who was honored. The academy welcomed “the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, the distances and the collective constraints of personal memory”.

His coronation with the Nobel marks a new cultural success on the world stage for the country of 51 million inhabitants, obsessed with rankings, analyzes journalist Sébastien Falletti. After the success of its cinema, with the Palme d’Or and the Oscar for the film Parasite, the triumph of the Squid game series on Netflix, and that of its K-pop groups, Seoul wins one more title to which it had long aspired to.

With this prize, Han Kang leaves with the tidy sum of 11 million Swedish crowns, or approximately 970,000 euros.