Ankhi Mukherjee, a literature professor at the University of Oxford, said that she had taught Han’s work “year in, year out” for almost two decades. “Her writing is relentlessly political — whether it’s the politics of the body, of gender, of people fighting against the state — but it never lets go of the literary imagination,” Mukherjee said, adding: “It’s never sanctimonious; it’s very playful, funny and surreal.”
The Nobel Prize is literature’s pre-eminent award, and winning it is a capstone to a writer, poet or playwright’s career. Past recipients have included Toni Morrison, Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan. Along with the prestige and a huge boost in sales, the new laureate receives 11 million Swedish krona, about $1 million.
Although relatively young for a Nobel laureate, Han is far older than Rudyard Kipling was when he accepted the 1907 award, at age 41.
In recent years, the academy has tried to increase the diversity of authors considered for the literature prize, after facing criticism over the low number of laureates who were female or came from outside Europe and North America.
Since 2020, the academy has awarded the prize to one person of color — Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian writer whose novels dissect the legacy of colonialism — as well as two women: Louise Glück, the American poet, and Annie Ernaux, the French writer of autobiographical works.
Last year’s recipient was Jon Fosse, a Norwegian author and playwright whose novels, told in lengthy sentences, often contain religious undertones.
Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting from Seoul, South Korea.