By Xu Aiying
Video = Nobel Prize's official YouTube channel

Novelist Han Kang is the nation's first laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Swedish Academy on Oct. 10 announced her as the winner of this year's award.

The Nobel Committee said the reason for her selection was "her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life."

"In her oeuvre, Han Kang confronts historical traumas and in each of her works exposes the fragility of human life," it added. "She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style, has become an innovator in contemporary prose."

Han is Korea's second Nobel laureate after the late former President Kim Dae-jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000. She is also the first Asian woman and 18th female winner of the honor.

In 2016, the novelist won the Man Booker International Prize of the U.K. for "The Vegetarian." Last year, she won the Prix Medicis of France for foreign literature for "I Do Not Bid Farewell."

In a phone interview with the committee that day, Han said about receiving the award, "I'm so surprised and honored," adding, "So I hope this news is nice for Korean literature readers and my friends, writers."

On her greatest inspirations, she said, "For me, since when I was a child, all writers have been collective. They are searching for meaning in life. Sometimes they are lost and sometimes they are determined, and all their efforts and all their strengths have been my inspiration." 

In addition, Korean American writer Kim Juhea on Oct. 10 was named this year's winner of the Foreign Literature Award of the Yasnaya Polyana Book Award of Russia, an honor given by the Leo Tolstoy Museum Estate (Yasnaya Polyana) and Samsung Electronics, for "Beasts of a Little Land." Kirill Batygin, who translated Kim's book into Russian, also received the prize.

xuaiy@korea.kr