South Korean author Han Kang wins the #NobelPrize in Literature ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life

By India Education Diary Bureau Admin On Oct 10, 2024

New Delhi: The 2024 NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

In her oeuvre, 2024 literature laureate Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.

Newly awarded literature laureate Han Kang’s work is characterised by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking. In Han Kang’s short story 에우로파 (2012; ‘Europa’, 2019), the male narrator, himself masked as a woman, is drawn to an enigmatic woman who has broken away from an impossible marriage. The narrative self remains silent when asked by his beloved: “If you were able to live as you desire, what would you do with your life?” There is no room here for either fulfillment or atonement.

In the novel 소년이 온다 (2014; ‘Human Acts’, 2016), Han Kang – awarded this year’s #NobelPrize in Literature – employs as her political foundation a historical event that took place in the city of Gwangju, where she herself grew up and where hundreds of students and unarmed civilians were murdered during a massacre carried out by the South Korean military in 1980. In seeking to give voice to the victims of history, the book confronts this episode with brutal actualisation and, in so doing, approaches the genre of witness literature. Han Kang’s style, as visionary as it is succinct, nevertheless deviates from our expectations of that genre, and it is a particular expedient of hers to permit the souls of the dead to be separated from their bodies, thus allowing them to witness their own annihilation. In certain moments, at the sight of the unidentifiable corpses that cannot be buried, the text harks back to the basic motif of Sophocles’s ‘Antigone’.