Hyderabad: The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to South Korean author Han Kang for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.
Kang, 53, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian, an unsettling novel in which a woman's decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.
Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy's Nobel Committee announced the prize in Stockholm. Her novel “Human Acts” was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2018.
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 so far. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.
Nobel announcements opened on October 7 with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the Physics Nobel 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 is set to be announced tomorrow and the Nobel Prize for Economics will be awarded on October 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.
Since 1901, the Nobel Prizes have been presented during the Nobel Week which culminates in the Nobel Prize ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall in Sweden and the Oslo City Hall in Norway on December 10, which marks the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.
The Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine and literature are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, while the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway.
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