The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to South Korean author Han Kang for what the Nobel committee called “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Kang, 53, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for “The Vegetarian,” an unsettling novel in which a woman's decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.

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