It was ultimately the South Korean Han Kang (33/1 on Ladbrokes) who was crowned the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. Bjorn Wiman, editor-in-chief of the Swedish newspaper Today’s Newshad, on the other hand, had a hollow nose. “I think it will be a woman from a language area outside Europe“, he declared to AFP in advance. Well done.
Nobel Prize – Norwegian Jon Fosse awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
History of violence
The Korean writer and poet was awarded “for his intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life”explained the jury in a press release. Han Kang, 53, was born in Gwangju, in the southwest of the country. A city that remains infamous in Korean history for its uprising. One hundred and sixty people were killed for protesting against dictator Chun Doo-hwan’s martial law in 1980. She was 9 years old. His parents (his father is the writer Han Sung-won) had decided to move to Seoul just before this tragedy, but the discovery of a book, three years later, on this episode in his hometown, profoundly changed him. marked.
“Since then, I have always tried to confront this contradictory force which pushes beings sometimes to throw themselves onto a railway track to save a child, sometimes to murder their fellow human beings by the thousands. Whatever book I write , this violence comes out”explained to World of Booksthe one who will write about this drama in The one who returns.
In Impossible goodbyesHang Kan will also discuss another dark point in the history of his country: the uprising on Jeju Island. When between 1948 and 1949, the South Korean army and police massacred around 30,000 residents during an uprising organized by the Communist Party of the time. Translated into French in 2011, she received the Foreign Medici Prize in 2023 for this novel. Her committed writings led to her being placed on a blacklist by the Korean Ministry of Culture like 10,000 other names, accused of criticizing the power of former President Park Geun-hye. The minister ended up in prison.
The Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux
Le Man Booker Prize
At university, Han Kang did not study the history of his country, but Korean literature on the Yonsei campus (Seoul). She quickly began writing and publishing poems and short stories: The Red Anchor will be awarded by the daily Seoul Shinmun. From then on, she wrote several novels which earned her, among other things, the Yi Sang Prize, a prestigious Korean prize.
It is the English translation of one of his novels, which will boost his notoriety outside his country. In 2016, she became the first Korean to win the Man Booker International Prize thanks to The Vegetarian, where she imagines a woman who wants to become a plant and leave the human species.
Han Kang succeeds the Norwegian Jon Fosse (2023), the French Annie Ernaux (2022), the Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021) and the American Louise Glück (2020). She is the 18th woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first South Korean in history. When she heard the news, she had just finished having dinner with her son. Calm. Not sure, either, that she bet on her coronation.
