Han Kang Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

Faiza Idrees

Han Kang, the South Korean author best known for “The Vegetarian,” was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday — the first writer from her country to receive the major award.

Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference in Stockholm that she was receiving the honor “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Han’s best-known book, “The Vegetarian,” published in Korea in 2007, won the 2016 International Booker Prize after it was translated into English. In the surreal novel, a depressed housewife shocks her family when she stops eating meat; later, she starves herself, thinking that she can feed off sunlight.

The New YorkTimes