Author Han Kang became on Thursday the first South Korean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for work characterised by the correspondence between mental and physical torment as well as historical events.
Han is best known for her book The Vegetarian, her first novel translated into English, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2016.
She was honoured with a Nobel "for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life," the Swedish Academy said.
Last year, the award went to Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, whose plays are among the most widely staged of any contemporary playwright in the world.
The Academy has long been criticised for the overrepresentation of Western white men authors among its picks.
The Swedish Academy has undergone major reforms since a devastating '#MeToo' scandal in 2018, vowing a more global and gender-equal literature prize.
Since the scandal, it has honoured four women including Han – the others are Annie Ernaux of France, US poet Louise Gluck and Poland's Olga Tokarczuk – and three men – Austrian author Peter Handke, Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah and Fosse.
The Nobel Prize comes with a diploma, a gold medal and a US$1-million prize sum.
Han will receive the award from King Carl XVI Gustav in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist and prize creator Alfred Nobel.
The Academy is known for its penchant for bringing lesser-known authors to a wider audience.
"I think they've gone to great pains to find some writer that will catch the culture commentariat with their pants down," Bjorn Wiman, culture editor at Sweden's newspaper of record, Dagens Nyheter, told AFP.
Since it was first awarded in 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been a Eurocentric, male affair.
Out of 120 laureates, only 17 have been women. But the Academy has made strides in that regard, crowning eight women in the past 20 years.
– TIMES/AFP
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