South Korean literature is in the spotlight. The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded this Thursday, October 10, to South Korean author Han Kang, 53. The writer, who writes poems and novels in Korean, was rewarded “for her intense poetic prose which confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life”, explained the jury in a press release.
His latest novel translated into French and published by Grasset, Impossible Farewells, was awarded the Medici Prize for Foreign Literature in 2023 in France. The author took the reader on a journey between contemporary South Korea and its painful past. Between dream and reality, a powerful novel about some of the massacres in Korea yesterday, commented L’Express journalist Marianne Payot after reading it. “Han Kang’s work is characterized by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental torment and physical torment, in close connection with Eastern thought,” said the Swedish Academy.
Unique awareness of the connections between body and soul
The author, born November 27, 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea, has “a unique awareness of the links between the body and the soul, the living and the dead, and, through her poetic and experimental style, she is considered to be innovative in the field of contemporary prose,” Nobel committee president Anders Olsson told the press. She is the first South Korean to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. She succeeds the Norwegian Jon Fosse, distinguished last year by the Swedish Academy “for his innovative plays and prose which gave voice to the inexpressible”, and the French Annie Ernaux in 2022.
The Nobel Prize in Literature rewards each year a writer whose work “has testified to a powerful ideal” according to Alfred Nobel’s wish in his will. The nominee receives 11 million Swedish crowns (nearly one million euros). Since 1901, 116 authors have been crowned in Stockholm – including 16 French, which places France at the top of the most awarded nations ahead of the United States, which has 13 winners. The awards ceremony in Stockholm will take place on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.