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South Korean author Han Kang, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday, has vowed after receiving other top literary prizes that she will continue writing “as if nothing had happened.”

The 53-year-old is the first South Korean woman to receive this award. The Swedish Academy praised “her intense poetic prose that deals with historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Hans “The Vegetarian,” which tells the story of an ordinary woman’s rejection of convention from three different perspectives, also won the Booker Prize in 2016.

She said after this award, which led to a surge in international sales in addition to her more familiar South Korean market, that she hoped to get out of the spotlight.

“I took the subway here,” she told reporters at the time. “I want to continue living as if nothing had happened.”

She is only the second South Korean to win a Nobel Prize, after former President Kim Dae-jung won the Peace Prize in 2000 for his efforts to end tensions with North Korea.

Han’s works are known for their profound and thought-provoking narratives, often exploring themes of violence and trauma.

Her 2014 novel “Human Acts” was inspired by the massacre in her hometown of Gwangju in 1980, when pro-democracy protests were brutally suppressed by the military.

And 2016’s The White Book is set in Warsaw and covers the unrest, death and cruelty of war.

“I believe that writing a novel based on a historical event is not only about recounting past events, but also about exploring human nature,” Han said in an interview with Yonhap news service last year .

She also said in a 2023 lecture in Gwangju that “the violent scenes depicted in the novels are not intended to reveal violence but to stand on the other side of it.”

Han’s father was also a renowned novelist, and when The Vegetarian became the most-read book in South Korea in 2007, local media praised her “inherited literary DNA.”

Her father replied that she had “already surpassed him.”

Han has said that writing is her way of making sense of the world.

“Writing for me means constantly questioning what life is, what death is, who I am,” she said in a 2015 interview with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

“When I write, especially when I write novels, I trade one, two, three, sometimes four years for that book,” she said.

Many in South Korea expressed shock and delight at her victory after other potential winners, including poet Ko Un, failed to attract the attention of the Nobel Academy.

“I think many writers like me had given up because they thought there was a limit to how Korean literature could be perceived by an international audience,” Bae Yoon-eum, a novelist, told AFP.

“I was just stunned when I saw the news, my heart stopped but I’m so happy. I’m so proud that South Korean literature is finally being recognized.”

Beyond its literary merits, the success of The Vegetarian, her first book published in English, was helped by South Korea’s simultaneous emergence as a prominent player on the global cultural stage.

Han is part of a new wave of younger writers seeking to break away from the traditional Korean reverence for intellectualism, which is often dominated by older male critics whose tastes are firmly rooted in the 1970s.

The author shared the Booker Prize check for 50,000 pounds ($72,000) with her British translator Deborah Smith.

The lack of skilled translators and the equally limited number of works suitable for foreign readers had long hampered efforts to attract a wider audience to Korea’s literary output.

That changed when the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI), which was founded in 1996 and has worked to promote new authors in recent years, gave translators the opportunity to choose the books they wanted to work on.

Translated fiction is still a very small genre, accounting for only 1.5 percent of fiction and 3.5 percent of literary fiction, but last year accounted for five percent of fiction sales and seven percent of literary fiction sales.

The growth of translated Korean fiction has been particularly strong in markets such as the UK.