(Radio Iowa) – The South Korean author who won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature spent time in Iowa in 1998. Han Kang was a writer in residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Christopher Merrill, program’s director, says Kang started out as a poet and six of her published novels have been translated into English. “These novels are the novels of a poet,” Merrill says, “someone with that musical understanding of what a sentence can do for a story.”

Merrill says Kang’s prose is very precise. “It’s a kind of chiseled prose,” Merrill says, “and she’s the sort of writer who pays close attention to sometimes just the most seemingly insignificant details.”

Kang is the third alum of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.