On that remarkable day, Han Kang’s telephone rings and she picks the phone with her usual “Hello” and finds that it is none other than the Swedish Academy to inform her of her winning the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Han Kang is an exception and this makes her the first-ever female Nobel Laureate in Asia in its 123-year history. Kang was born and raised in the South Korean city of Gwangiu. ‘The Vegetarian’, her three-part novel, originally published in 2007 won the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2024.
The international media rushed to quote the statement made by the Swedish Academy when it announced the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2024 which stated: “For her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”, Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’ was selected as the winner in this category.
Prize winning masterpiece
Kang’s Nobel Prize winning masterpiece has got a distinctive and exceptional body of work and has been acknowledged with esteemed recognition which is not merely for its swift and instantaneous impact but also for its enduring and abiding benefaction in the domain of literature.
Being the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kang reaches the pinnacle of her literary achievement. In the pursuit of exploring issues of such nature, she uses Literature as a platform for explication and appraisal that comes from around the world.
With ‘The Vegetarian’, Kang masterfully devotes her time, energy and words with multiple issues ranging from different spectra in society where conflicts in politics, culture and society take centre-stage.
Being a graduate in Korean Literature and a teacher of the same for many years, Kang is considerably conscious and curious about her use of Language; it resonates with sentiments, passion, colour, relish and texture in her narrative.
Command of Language
Her refined, trailblazing and command of the Language, remaining within her prose is a dowry inherited by her initial experience as a local poet way back in 1993 during which time she started her writing career. The lyrical emotion created by her beautiful imagery doesn’t invade the comfortable zone of the reader; it makes room for the reader to have an effortless inference and comprehension about the message that the author tries to disseminate.
Universal flair
Kang gives an assurance to herself where she maintains an outright and universal flair around her writing ability. Her knack to keep the reader constantly bewitched and beguiled by her plot even when her writing seems to be anticlimactic and negative is rather captivating; it is her unique forte which is phenomenally and significantly visible as in any award winning author.
Kang’s astounding and astonishing style of using literary devices makes her an exception; her readers would frequently make room for a sincere justification where it is not difficult to notice the fact that she embodies real life, benignity and humanity which she depicts in her fiction.
Outstanding literary quality
As a reader, I am literally blown away by her outstanding literary quality; it is a combination of a variety of strategies among which is deep thematic exploration, incredibly unassuming narrative style and innovative and a novel approach with the written language achieve a greater prominence.
Her writing has a notable impact on culture and literature; she arguably tries to maintain at least the fundamentals of the relationship between one’s culture and literature.
However, she doesn’t fail in her attempt of shaping literary movements, challenging the deeply-rooted societal norms. She has already become a pivotal force in world literature, where the influence she has got on the generations of future writers is tremendous.
Kang becomes distinctively atypical in addressing the omnipresent, unbigoted and eclectic experiences; universal human experiences are right within the boundaries of her writing.
Themes such as love, hatred, resilience, identity crisis and conflicts are within her immediate approach; she makes them ring and roll across different time periods and cultures.
The versatile Deborah Smith translated ‘The Vegetarian’. Last but not least, I cannot resist decorating my piece with the following words that I quote from Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’, “Nobody can help me. Nobody can save me. Nobody can make me breathe”.
