South Korean novelist Han Kang has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life".

The announcement was made by the Swedish Academy's Nobel Committee on Thursday evening, Australian time.

The committee's chair, Anders Olsson, praised Han's "physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives" of her characters.

"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," he said.

Han has published four full-length novels, having begun her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the mazaine Literature and Society.

Her major international breakthrough came with her third novel, 2007's The Vegetarian, for which she won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016.

She was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer in 2023, and is now the first South Korean to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Han's selection a break from tradition

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

It has also been male-dominated, with Han just the 18th woman among the prize's 120 laureates to date.

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

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