South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.

Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee, announced the prize in Stockholm on Thursday.

Han, 53, is the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize.

Malm said he was able to talk to Han by phone. She was having an ordinary day and had “just finished supper with her son” when he broke the news to her.

Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised her “physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters.

He said her work “confronts historical traumas and in each of her works exposes the fragility of human life”.

The 2023 prize went to Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse, who was honoured for “his innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable”.

The literature prize has long been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its laureates. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1m) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Alongside the cash prize, the winners will be presented with a medal on December 10.

Han was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju before moving with her family to Seoul at the age of nine.

She comes from a literary background as her father, Han Seung-won, is a reputed novelist.

She began her career in 1993 with the publication of several poems in the magazine Literature and Society, her prose debut coming in 1995 with the short story collection, Love of Yeosu.

Her major international breakthrough came in 2007 with the novel, The Vegetarian. Written in three parts, it is an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.

In the 2014 novel Human Acts, set in the city of Gwangju where she herself grew up, she confronted her country’s history of state violence by giving voice to the victims of a massacre carried out by the South Korean military in 1980.

The committee said her work is characterised by a “double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking”.

Mentioned as a case in point is her 2013 novel Convalescence, which involves a leg ulcer that refuses to heal and a painful relationship between the main character and her dead sister.

“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 committee said.

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, the latest Nobel Prize winners in medicine, have been recognized for their groundbreaking discovery of microRNA in human DNA.
This genetic switch, capable of turning gene functions on or off, holds immense potential for treating various diseases, including cancer, heart ailments, and viral infections.
Despite the scientists initially considering their findings as merely “something weird about worms,” according to Cambridge University geneticist Eric Miska, the implications of their work have far-reaching consequences.
How does the genetic switch work
Miska gave the example of the messenger RNA vaccines rolled out against COVID-19 during the pandemic, which inserts a message with new instructions to build proteins that block viruses.
But the two new Nobel winners Ambros and Ruvkun discovered a new type of gene regulator previously overlooked by science.
Rather than being the messenger which relays information, microRNA instead acts as a switch to turn other genes off and on.
“This was a whole new level of control that we had totally missed,” said Miska, who has worked on microRNA for two decades, including with the new Nobel laureates.
“The discovery of microRNAs brought an additional level of complexity by revealing that regions that were thought to be non-coding play a role in gene regulation,” French researcher Benoit Ballester told AFP.
What is microRNA?
Each cell in the human body has the same set of instructions, called DNA. Some turn into brain cells, while others become muscles.
MicroRNAs are particularly promising for fighting cancer because some of these switches “act as a tumour suppressor, so they put a brake on cells dividing inappropriately,” Miska said.
Others, meanwhile, induce “cells to divide, which can lead to cancer”, he added.
So how do the cells know what to become?
The relevant part of the DNA’s instructions is pointed to via a process called gene regulation.
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) normally serves as a messenger. It delivers the instructions from the DNA to proteins, which are the building blocks of life that turn cells into brains — or muscles, AFP reported