South Korean Han Kang receives the Nobel Prize for Literature

She is best known in France for her novel The vegetariantranslated by Le Serpent à Plumes. But it is a complete and successful career that the jury salutes by awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature this Thursday to the South Korean author Han Kang.

The 53-year-old author, 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.

First South Korean to be awarded

Born in Gwangju in 1970, she grew up in Seoul, the Korean capital, while the country was experiencing rapid growth and healing the wounds of the war with the North. She studied Korean literature, before writing some of its most beautiful pages. The Vegetarian, A book that attracted critical attention was released in 2007. She talks about a heroine who abandons everything related to the flesh to become a plant, a book that has become cult in the South Korean feminist community.

Alongside writing, she also devoted herself to art and music, which is reflected in all of her literary output. “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.

With this new distinction, the most prestigious in the world of Letters, Han Kang becomes the first South Korean Nobel Prize winner in literature.