South Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for "her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life", the award-giving body said on Thursday, Report informs via Reuters.
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
"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," Anders Olsson, chairman of the Academy's Nobel Committee, said in a statement.
Han Kang, the first South Korean and the 18th woman to win the literature prize, began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine Literature and Society, while her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection "Love of Yeosu".
In a telephone interview with the Academy after the prize was announced, she said her celebrations would be low-key. "After this phone call I'd like to have tea with - I don't drink so - I'm going to have tea with my son and I'll celebrate it quietly tonight."
Han said she had just finished dinner when she heard from the Academy. She said she was "so surprised and ... absolutely I'm honoured".
Born in 1970, she comes from a literary background, her father being a well-regarded novelist.
Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction for her novel "The Vegetarian" in 2016, the first of her novels to be translated into English and regarded as her major international breakthrough.
The Nobel prizes were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and began in 1901.
Past winners of the literature prize include luminaries such as Irish poet W.B. Yeats, American novelist Ernest Hemingway and Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez.