South Korean writer Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature, “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. The 53-year-old is the first South Korean writer to win the prize, and only the 18th woman (of 121 winners to date). She is also a musician, and interested in visual art.
Her best known novel, The Vegetarian (published in Korea in 2007), was her first to be translated into English, in 2015. It won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, with the prize split between Han Kang and her translator, Deborah Smith.
At the time, Smith’s translation sparked fervid debates about its accuracy. But this is the beauty of literary translation as an act of creation: it’s an imaginative exercise, not a literal one, and Han Kang has stood by her translator.
