© 2024 WVIK
Listen at 90.3 FM and 98.3 FM in the Quad Cities, 95.9 FM in Dubuque, or on the WVIK app!
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Nobel Prize in Literature winner Han Kang once attended Iowa’s International Writing Program

The Vegetarian by Han Kang became the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction in 2016.
Madeleine Charis King
/
Iowa Public Radio
The Vegetarian by Han Kang became the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction in 2016.

Kang is the first Korean writer to win the award. International Writing Program Director Christopher Merrill says several IWP alum were considered for this year’s prize. 

South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. The writer is best known for her 2007 novel, The Vegetarian, which won the International Booker Prize in 2016 and was named among the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Publisher’s Weekly and TIME.

Kang began her writing career as a poet. She attended the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa as a young writer in 1998, after five of her poems had been featured in a literary magazine. She’d also published her first story collection in 1995.

While in Iowa City, she spoke with the International Writing Program in 1998 about writing her books, The Black Deer and Love of Yeosu.

Han Kang
Contributed
Nobel Prize in Literature recipient Han Kang.

The Nobel Foundation commended Kang for her powerful prose, saying her writing “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,” the foundation stated.

Christopher Merrill, the program’s director, said there’s great power in Kang’s precise, chiseled prose, and her beginnings in poetry are evident.

“She approaches things from the side, maybe indirectly,” he said. “These novels are the novels of a poet, someone with that musical understanding of what a sentence can do for a story.”

Merrill says IWP writers have now won all the major prizes around the world. Kang was among at least five other IWP alumni in the running for the Nobel Prize.

She’s also the third former resident to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Istanbul-born novelist Orhan Pamuk, who was in residence in 1985, received the honor in 2006, and Chinese novelist Mo Yan, a 2004 resident, won the award in 2012.

"This is just more proof that if you you bring writers to a really lively literary community like Iowa City, good things will happen," Merrill said. "We're thrilled."

Han’s other novels include Greek Lessons, Human Acts, The White Book and We Do Not Part, which will be published in English in 2025.

Josie Fischels is IPR's Arts & Culture Reporter, with expertise in performance art, visual art and Iowa Life. She's covered local and statewide arts, news and lifestyle features for The Daily Iowan, The Denver Post, NPR and currently for IPR. Fischels is a University of Iowa graduate.