Han Kang, South Korean author, wins Nobel Prize in Literature for poetic prose | Canada Voices

South Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” the award-giving body said on Thursday.

The winner follows Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who was honored last year for writing in Nynorsk, one of the two official written versions of the Norwegian language, that prize organizers said gives “voice to the unsayable.”

The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its 119 laureates. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize on Tuesday. On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.