The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to South Korean author Han Kang for what the Nobel Committee called "her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life." Han, 53, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian, an unsettling novel in which a woman's decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences, per the AP. "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," Anders Olsson, chair of the committee, notes in a release. Han's father, Han Seung-won, is also a renowned novelist.
The literature prize has long faced criticism that it's too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its 119 laureates. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022. Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of artificial intelligence—John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton—won the physics prize on Tuesday. On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday, and the economics award on Oct. 14.
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