Han is the first South Korean winner of the prize, who was described by the Nobel Prize board as someone who has “devoted herself to music and art”.
The statement also added that her work crosses boundaries by exploring a broad span of genres – these include violence, grief and patriarchy.
A turning point for her career came in 2016, when she won the International Man Booker prize for The Vegetarian – a book which had been released nearly a decade before, but was first translated into English in 2015 by Deborah Smith.
It depicts the violent consequences for a woman who refuses to submit to the norms of food intake.
Han’s other works include The White Book, Human Acts and Greek Lessons.
Swedish Academy permanent secretary Mats Malm said at the ceremony that “she wasn’t really prepared” to win the prize.
Committee chair Anders Olsen also said she “confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life”.
He praised her “poetic and experimental style”, and called her “an innovator in contemporary prose”.
The chair added she has “unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead”.
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