This Year’s Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Made History

Han Kang, the South Korean author best known for her surreal novel The Vegetarian, has just been announced as the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first author from her country to ever do so.

The Vegetarian was originally published in 2007, then it was translated to English and released in 2016, which won it that year’s International Booker Prize. It follows a married woman who bucks tradition and stops eating meat, which eventually leads to her eating nothing at all. This passive rebellion is a result of wanting to have a ‘”plant-like” existence’ — but passive though it is, it leads her down a path of abuse, estrangement, and a complete change of body and mind.

The Nobel Prize is named for Alfred Nobel, a writer, entrepreneur, and scientist whose will helped establish the award. Since 1901, Nobel Prizes have been awarded to people from all over the world “for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and for work in peace.”

Han Kang won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” and for her “unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead.”

To read more about the prize, visit Nobel Prize.org. For Han Kang’s biobibliography, visit the award’s biobliography page for the author.

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