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.
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.
Swedish Academy permanent secretary Mats Malm announces Han as the winner. (TT News Agency via Reuters: Jessica Gow)
Bookmaker favourites ahead of the announcement included Chinese writer Can Xue and many other perennial possible candidates, such as Kenya's Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Australia's Gerald Murnane and Canada's Anne Carson.
The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.46 million) from a bequest left by the award's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
Six days of Nobel announcements began on Monday, with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the prize for medicine.
Two of the founders of machine learning — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the physics prize on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday, and the economics award on Monday, October 14.
The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death.
ABC/Wires