Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature last decade – Millennium Group

The South Korean writer Han Kang was awarded this Thursday with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” The Swedish Academy announced this Thursday.

The academy considers that Han Kang’s work is characterized by a double exposure of suffering -as mental and physical torment- and for its connections with Eastern thought.

​Who have been the latest winners?

These were the last ten winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

• 2024: Han Kang (South Korea) for “his intense poetic prose, which confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
• 2023: Jon Fosse (Norway) for “his innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unspeakable.”
• 2022: Annie Ernaux (France) for “the courage and clinical acuity with which he discovers the roots, distances and collective restrictions of personal memory.”
• 2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah (United Kingdom) for “its empathetic and uncompromising account of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees caught between cultures and continents.”
• 2020: Louise Glück (United States) for “his characteristic poetic voice that, with its austere beauty, makes individual existence universal.”
• 2019: Peter Handke (Austria) for “his influential work that, with much linguistic ingenuity, explored the periphery and singularity of human experience.”
• 2018: Olga Tokarczuk (Poland) for “a narrative imagination that, with an encyclopedic passion, symbolizes the overcoming of borders as a way of life.”
• 2017: Kazuo Ishiguro (United Kingdom) who “has revealed, in novels of powerful emotional force, the abyss beneath our illusory sense of comfort in the world.”
• 2016: Bob Dylan (United States) for “having created, within the framework of the great tradition of American music, new modes of poetic expression.”
• 2015: Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus) for “his polyphonic work, a memorial of suffering and courage in our time.”

Who is Han Kang, the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature?

The author, born on November 27, 1970 in Gwanju, South Korea, has “a unique awareness of the relationships between body and soul, the living and the dead and, due to its poetic and experimental style, it is considered an innovator in the field of contemporary prose,” declared the president of the Nobel Committee, Anders Olsson, before the press.

Han Kang became internationally known with his novel The vegetarian (2007). Written in three parts, the work describes the violent consequences of its protagonist, Yeong-hye,’s refusal to eat meat, which provokes the brutal rejection of his environment.

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