Han Kang receives the Nobel Prize for Literature

Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel committee, said in a statement that Hahn, in his writings, “possessed a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in his poetic and experimental style he became ‘the innovator of contemporary prose.’”

Anki Mukherjee, a professor of literature at Oxford University, said in a phone interview that she has taught Hahn’s works “year after year” for nearly two decades. “Her writing is relentlessly political – whether it is body politics, gender politics, or people fighting the state – but she never leaves literary imagination aside,” Mukherjee said, adding: “It is never moralistic; “It’s fun, it’s fun, it’s very surreal.”

The Nobel Prize is the most important award in literature, and winning it is the final touch in the career of a writer, poet, or playwright. Winners include Toni Morrison, Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. In addition to prestige and a significant increase in sales, the new winner receives 11 million Swedish krona, or about one million dollars.

In recent years, the Academy has sought to increase the diversity of authors nominated for the literature prize, after facing criticism over the low number of winners who are women or from outside Europe and North America.

Since 2020, the Academy has given the prize to a person of color — Abdul Razak Gurnah, a Tanzanian writer whose novels analyze the legacy of colonialism — as well as two women: Louise Glück, an American poet, and Annie Ernault, a French playwright. the biography.