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.
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.