South Korean author Han Kang, the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature
Credit: Reuters Photo
The Nobel Prize for Literature has come to Asia after many years, and South Korean writer Han Kang is the first Asian woman to win it. Only 18 women have won the literature prize in its history. The bias for the white male has been pronounced in the matter of all prizes. This year, too, Han Hang is the only woman to win a prize, and the prizes for all other disciples have gone to men. The award for Han Kang therefore has a special significance. The Swedish Academy said that she was awarded for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” The award was a surprise for many because she was not on the short-list that goes round in literary circles before the announcement. But the choice has been hailed as right and appropriate for many reasons, unlike many times in the past.
Han Kang is best known for her 2007 novel The Vegetarian, which won the 2016 International Booker Prize. It was about a housewife who stops eating meat and the problems that it creates in the family and outside. She uses fantasy and the unreal to explore the mystery of life. There is a streak of resistance and rebellion in all her works against the extremely patriarchal and misogynistic society that she grew up in. She engages also with contemporary history and grapples with some traumatic events, such as a massacre in her home town Gwangju, which was sought to be blacked out from public consciousness. It woke her up to the human capacity for violence, which she explored in a novel The Human Acts. It is also a statement against dictatorship and oppression of the spirit, of all kinds.
Han Kang has said that her preoccupation has been with the riddle of how humans can be so violent and be so sublime. She keeps returning to the theme of what it means to be human. This has been the eternal preoccupation of all writers and artists, great, good and lesser ones. It is expressed in myriad ways, shaped by the personal, social and other circumstances of the writer. It is the individual writer’s genius that gives the universal urge to state and interpret the human condition a local hue and colour. Han Kang told stories of strange women in strange ways, and through them the truth about her community, her country and the world beyond, peopled with both women and men. One needs to look through life to see its horror and glory, and how the two are linked. Han Kang dared to look, and being a woman helped.