By Adedapo Adesanya
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang.
She was awarded “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” the Royal Swedish Academy said on Thursday.
Ms Kang’s work is characterised by this double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking.
“In her oeuvre, Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. 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,” Mr Anders Olsson Chairman of the Nobel Committee said of the literature laureate.
She was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju before, at the age of nine, moving with her family to Seoul. She comes from a literary background, her father being a reputed novelist.
Alongside her writing, she has also devoted herself to art and music, which is reflected throughout her entire literary production.
Ms Kang began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine Literature and Society. Her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection Love of Yeosu, followed soon afterwards by several other prose works, both novels and short stories.
Her major international breakthrough came with the novel The Vegetarian (2015) which was initially published in 2007. The book is written in three parts and portrays the violent consequences that ensue when its protagonist Yeong-hye refuses to submit to the norms of food intake.
On Friday, the award will be handed out for peace while next week Monday, the yearly event will culminate with the prize for economics.
Modupe Gbadeyanka 
Dipo Olowookere