The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded Thursday to South Korean author Han Kang for what the Nobel Committee called “her intense poetic prose that grapples with historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee, announced the award ceremony in Stockholm.

Han, 53, won the 2016 International Booker Prize for “The Vegetarian,” a disturbing novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.

Her novel “Human Acts” was a finalist for the International Booker Prize in 2018.

The literary prize has long been criticized for focusing too much on European and North American authors of style-heavy, plot-poor prose. The competition was also dominated by men, with only 17 of the 119 winners so far being women. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France in 2022.

Six days of Nobel Prize announcements began 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 for decoding and even designing novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the Economics Prize on October 14th.

The prize carries a cash prize of 11 million Swedish kroner (US$1 million) from an estate of the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.