South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.

Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee, announced the prize in Stockholm on Thursday.

Han, 53, is the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize.

Malm said he was able to talk to Han by phone. She was having an ordinary day and had “just finished supper with her son” when he broke the news to her.

Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised her “physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters.

He said her work “confronts historical traumas and in each of her works exposes the fragility of human life”.

The 2023 prize went to Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse, who was honoured for “his innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable”.