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.
