Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” One of only 18 women to be awarded global literature’s highest honor, she is the first South Korean writer to win the prize and the first Asian laureate since 2012, when the Nobel was awarded to Chinese author Mo Yan.

“Han Kang’s visible empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives, is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose,” said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee at the Swedish Academy, the body that administers the prize. “In her oeuvre,” he added, quoting from the Committee’s citation, “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.”

The honors for Han come amid a global rise in interest in creative works from South Korea over the past decade, driven in part, as PW reported in the leadup to this year’s London Book Fair, by the soaring popularity of K-dramas and K-pop, as well as the ballooning webtoon and webcomics business. The reception of her novel The Vegetarian, in particular, points to this interest in the books sector; it has been translated into two dozen languages since its 2007 publication in the Korean, and was released in the United States in 2016.

“Han Kang is simply one of our greatest living writers. Her novels powerfully chronicle the question of what it means to be human—they give the world back its wonder, its mystery, its beauty, its pain. Everyone at Hogarth is enormously proud to have published all of Kang’s books in English for nearly a decade,” Parisa Ebrahimi, executive editor at Hogarth, said in a statement to PW. “Her books change the way we think and feel about the world—a sentiment shared by so many readers who have encountered her work over the years.”

Han, 53, was born in 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea’s sixth-largest city, before moving to its capital, Seoul, at age nine, along with her family. Han comes from literary stock: she is the daughter of the award-winning South Korean novelist Han Seung-won, and her two brothers, according to one of her translators, Deborah Smith, are also writers. She is also involved in other creative arts: “Alongside her writing,” per the Nobel Committee, “she has also devoted herself to art and music, which is reflected throughout her entire literary production.”

Six of Han’s works have been published in English-language translations to date—Convalescence (2011), The Vegetarian (2015), Human Acts (2016), The White Book (2019), Europa (2019), and Greek Lessons (2023)—and Hogarth will go back to press with all five books it publishes, although the publisher did not offer any information related to print runs. Han was awarded the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian, which has sold more than 350,000 copies across all formats, per Hogarth, and 145,000 combined hardcover and paperback copies to date, per Circana BookScan, making it by far her bestselling book in the U.S. market.

“Written in three parts, the book portrays the violent consequences that ensue when its protagonist Yeong-hye refuses to submit to the norms of food intake,” the Committee wrote in its summary of Han’s biography and bibliography. “Her decision not to eat meat is met with various, entirely different reactions.”

In his signed review of the book, former PW fiction editor Gabe Habash called The Vegetarian “an ingenious, upsetting, and unforgettable novel,” adding: “Its three-part structure is brilliant, gradually digging deeper and deeper into darker and darker places; the writing is spare and haunting; but perhaps most memorable is its crushing climax, a phantasmagoric yet emotionally true moment.”

Han's novel We Do Not Part, published in South Korea in 2021, is forthcoming from Hogarth Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House and Han’s longtime U.S. publisher, in a translation by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, on January 21. In its review, PW called the book “an indelible exploration of Korea’s historical traumas through the story of a writer who discovers how her friend’s family was impacted by the 1948–1949 Jeju Massacre, in which U.S.-backed Korean forces killed over 30,000 Jeju Island residents suspected of aiding insurgents.”

Han is best known for her novels, and, among Korean readers, “for her ‘poetic’ yet spare and quiet style,” translator Deborah Smith wrote in a piece for Asymptote, a literary journal with a focus on works in translation, earlier this year. “In her work, she often comes back to themes of remembrance and Korean history, approaching the subjects in a deeply empathetic though notably neutral way, never telling the readers what to feel or think.”

The characterizations of Han’s work as “poetic” are well earned; she began her writing career as a poet. In an interview with PW last year, in advance of the publication of Greek Lessons, she suggested that it was poetry that attuned her to the particularities of language—including how it can fail us.

“Maybe because I started my writing with poetry, I always feel that language falls short—short of reaching anything,” Han said. “It’s like an arrow that flies but always fails to reach the target.”

Noting that her novels explore themes of human violence, often with brutal intensity, Han said that, while she abhors violence, “I want to be truthful. I don’t like very violent movies, but when I look into the depth of humans, when I look into the world, I cannot just look away. I feel that I should penetrate the raw truth of humans and the world.”

This story has been updated with further information.