Han Kang, South Korea's first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was slow to secure global acclaim, getting her first big international prize nine years after her best-known novel was published,

Major South Korean bookstores sold out of author Han Kang's books Friday, as sales skyrocketed and the share price of local publishers soared following her historic Nobel Prize win.

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