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South Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for "her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life", the award-giving body said on Thursday. The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million). "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," Anders Olsson, chairman of the academy's Nobel Committee, said in a statement. Han Kang is the first South Korean to win the literature prize. Born in 1970, she comes from a literary background, her father being a well-regarded novelist. Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction for her novel "The Vegetarian" in 2016, the first of her novels to be translated into English and regarded as her major international breakthrough.