South Korean writer Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born on November 27, 1970. She won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 for The Vegetarian, a novel about a woman’s descent into mental illness and abandonment by his family. Among Han Kang’s works published in Italy by Adelphi, l’ora di Greco, Atti Umani (Malaparte Prize in 2017), La Vegetariana, Convalescence.
«I was able to talk to Han Kang on the phone. He seemed to be having a normal day: he had just finished dinner with his son. She wasn’t prepared for this, but we started discussing preparations for December”: this was said – according to the Guardian – by the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Mats Malm after announcing the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature who will be awarded to her on December 10. According to Anders Olsson, secretary of the Academy, Kang “has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, living and dead, and with an experimental style she has become an innovator.”
Who is Han Kang?
Han Kang, Nobel Prize for Literature 2024, has always cultivated a love for art and music alongside writing, as is reflected in all his literary production. Born on November 27, 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju, she moved with her family to Seoul at the age of nine. Daughter of art, her father was the famous novelist Han Seungwon. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 for La Vegetariana, a novel about a woman who wants to become a plant which became a literary case that made her known throughout the world, and of the Malaparte Prize in 2017 with Atti Umani, Han Kang has began his career in 1993 with the publication of five poems in the magazine Literature and Society. In Human Acts she was inspired by an episode of urban revolt that actually occurred in 1980 in Gwangju, where she grew up and where hundreds of students and unarmed civilians were murdered during a massacre carried out by the South Korean army. His debut in fiction in 1995 with the collection of short stories Yeosu’s Love. With the story Red Anchor he won the Seoul Shinmun Spring Literary Contest. Original and innovative writer, seventeenth woman to win the Nobel Prize for LiteratureHan Kang studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Among his works published in Italy by Adelphi also L’Ora di Greco and Convalescence. Also for Adelphi, a sort of arduous and painful winter journey is expected on November 5, 2024 in bookshops. I don’t say goodbye, in Lia Iovenitti’s translation.