South Korean author Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for a poetic and unsettling body of work that the Nobel committee said “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
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00:00The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 is awarded to South Korean author Han Kang
00:06for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility
00:12of human life. I was able to talk to Han Kang on the phone. She was having an ordinary day,
00:21it seems, had just finished supper with her son. She wasn't really prepared for this but
00:30we have begun to discuss preparations for December. We look very much forward to meeting her here
00:39then. In her oeuvre, Han Kang, as expressed in the academy citation, confronts historical traumas
00:48and in each of her works exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness
00:56of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic
01:03and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose. It's a very very special
01:10writer and a very complex and rich that spans many different genres and this is the decision
01:17we reached this year to award Han Kang the Nobel Prize in Literature. What we look for is always
01:23literary quality but I think that this writer is also someone that can talk to many people all
01:30over the world because her main theme is, I would say, about survival and even whether she writes
01:38about traumas, pain and loss on an individual level or on a greater political scale where
01:44certain events, historical events, can traumatize generations. She always does this with the same
01:51compassion and care and this I think is something that is quite remarkable with her authorship.