The Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded 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”.

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

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.

Books by the South Korean writer Han Kang displayed at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm
Books by the South Korean writer Han Kang displayed at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm (Jessica Gow/AP)

At the time of winning that award, Han said writing novels “is a way of questioning for me”.

“I just try to complete my questions through the process of my writing and I try to stay in the questions, sometimes painful, sometimes – well – sometimes demanding,” she said.

With The Vegetarian, she said, ”I wanted to question about being human and I wanted to describe a woman who desperately didn’t want to belong to the human race any longer.”

Han made her publishing debut as a poet in 1993 – her first short story collection was published the following year and her first novel, Black Deer, in 1998.

Works translated into English include The Vegetarian, Greek Lessons, Human Acts and The White Book, a poetic novel that draws on the death of Han’s older sister shortly after birth.

Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary Mats Malm announces the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature
Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary Mats Malm announces the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature (Jessica Gow/AP)

The White Book was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2018.

Her most recent novel, We Do Not Part, is due to be published in English next year.

Han wins the Nobel at a time of growing global influence of South Korean culture, which in recent years has included the success of films like director Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning “ Parasite”, the Netflix survival drama “Squid Game” and the worldwide fame of K-pop groups like BTS and BLACKPINK.

Her novel Human Acts was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2018.

The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose.

Nobel Literature
Han Kang listens to a reporter’s question in front of a banner of her new fiction during a news conference in Seoul, South Korea (Lee Jin-man/AP)

It has also been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its 119 laureates so far.

The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.

Six days of Nobel announcements opened on Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize.

Two founding fathers of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on October 14.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (£808,000) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.

The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10 – the anniversary of Nobel’s death.