Han Kang, Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 | Culture

Sensational news has spread through the literary world today: the South Korean Han Kang has been chosen this Thursday in October by the Nobel Committee for the highest award in universal literature. Award to a woman; award to a young woman in terms of recognition (she was born in 1970); award to a South Korean, a superb recognition of a culture that is penetrating the West and the entire world for good reasons and in all disciplines; and finally, a prize for a topic of enormous relevance: the relationship of the body with nature. Han Kang is the youngest laureate in 37 years. Just a year ago he declared to EL PAÍS: “Language is a unique and important medium, but at the same time it is what makes me suffer.” Nobel’s word.

The South Korean author, 53, is the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, as announced this Thursday by the Swedish Academy. The jury highlighted his “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” The narrator had had “a normal day and had just had dinner with her son” when she received the call most desired by the writers, according to the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Mats Malm, after revealing Han Kang’s name. The most prestigious literary award in the world is worth 11 million Swedish crowns (about 970,000 euros), in addition to guaranteeing an increase in prestige, fame and book sales for whoever receives it.

The vegetarian, Published in Spain by Rata in 2017, it is undoubtedly a rich, precise, refined novel, capable of sustaining the tension and plot based on the intimacy of a woman who begins to change her relationship with food and nature. There is great internal reflection, there is narrative skill, there is anguish hidden in a literary construction that aims to illuminate a social, urban and family moment shaken by a conscience in full collision with conventions. The way of consuming, of relating, of establishing links with the closest beings and the environment is a major topic in this first quarter of the 21st century that very few writers dare to address or are capable of doing so with such quality. Changing without asking permission, changing at the expense of what people will say, changing even at the expense of relationships with the most loved ones is the driving force of a powerful story that hides anxiety in its security. In his resounding determination despite the suffering that occurred. No one will envy the idea of ​​becoming a vegetarian when reading it, but we will all applaud its prose, capable of including an unreal dimension in the full outline of reality in more than adequate doses.

later came Greek class this time in Random House Literature, a meticulous story in which that suffocation that festered The vegetarian The flow of his writing is already overflowing. The anguish is in the foreground. The protagonist has lost her voice, as she has lost her mother and even the custody of a son and only the recourse to a classical language like Greek (again the distance from the normative, from the closest social convention, the break with everyday life) may begin to be your salvation. His connection with the professor begins to be a life jacket, a strange bulwark to get back afloat. And if she is losing her voice, no less distressing is the loss of sight that he is suffering, like Borges, to whom he alludes from the beginning. In September 2023 he passed through Madrid and explained this novel to us in an interview with EL PAÍS: “After The vegetarian, It was my third novel, I started writing the fourth and I got blocked. I stopped writing for a year and forgot how to do it. I also couldn’t read any fiction. After a deep rest I was able to do it again and that’s how it was born Greek class which certainly arose from that idea of ​​silence that I have experienced,” he confessed.

The news shook the literary world and took it by surprise. All eyes pointed to an Asian bet and the pools pointed to Can Xue, 71, after several years with European predominance, as usual (the Norwegian Jon Fosse won in 2023; the French Annie Ernaux in 2022), and some surprise like the Tanzanian Abdulrrazak Gurnah (2021). But the one chosen has been an internationally recognized voice and with the topical impact that her books and topics have put on the table. And this is not usual.

Han Kang (Gwangju, South Korea, 1970) began his career as a novelist by winning the Seoul Shinmun spring literary competition in 1994. In 2016 he won the International Booker Prize with The vegetarian (Rata), his third novel and first translated into English, a suffocating portrait of the isolation in which a person can immerse themselves by changing without the permission of others. “Written in three parts, it portrays the violent consequences that appear when the protagonist, Yeong-hye, refuses to submit to the rules of food consumption,” a spokesperson for the Swedish Academy summarized it at the event. His works have been published in more than 30 languages.

Con The white paper competed again for the International Booker, although this time solo was a finalist. Last year he published in Spain Greek class (Random House Literature), a cry of silence in which voice and language fight against their annihilation. The author was among the betting favorites, but not among the first. The English houses placed her at the level of the Spanish Enrique Vila-Matas: her victory was paid 33/1.

Over the last decade, the Swedish Academy has opted for greater diversity in its elections, both in the origins of the winners (European, African and Chinese) and in the genres, from the reporting of Svetlana Alexievich to the songs of Bob Dylan.

The last award to a Spanish speaker, Mario Vargas Llosa, was 14 years ago; The previous one dates back to 1990, to Octavio Paz. Writers in Spanish have 11 winners, compared to 29 in English, 16 French, 15 German or six Italian. On the list of winners, throughout history, names such as WB Yeats, Ivan Bunin, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Camilo José Cela, Nadine Gordimer, Wislawa Szymborska, JMG Le Clézio, Patrick Modiano, Orhan Pamuk, Gabriel García appear Márquez, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow or Herta Müller. Jean-Paul Sartre, awarded in 1964, was the only author to reject the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as its financial award, for fear that it would affect “the impact of his writings” and avoid being “institutionalized.” In the last ten years, five men and five women have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Throughout history, only 18 women have won, including Han Kang, among the 121 total winners. The Swedish Selma Lagerlöf was the first, in 1909.