“I grew up with Korean literature, which I feel very close [to],” said Han, whose father and brother are both novelists. “So I hope this news is nice for Korean literature readers and my friends, writers.”

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As for celebrating the win, she said: “I’m going to have tea with my son and I’ll celebrate it quietly tonight.”

Han wins the Nobel at a time of growing global influence of South Korean culture, which in recent years has included the success of films such as director Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite, the Netflix survival drama Squid Game and the worldwide fame of K-pop groups such as BTS and BLACKPINK.

Han, 53, won the International Booker Prize for fiction translated into English in 2016 for The Vegetarian, an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.

Accepting that award, Han said writing novels “is a way of questioning for me”.

“I just try to complete my questions through the process of my writing and I try to stay in the questions, sometimes painful, sometimes – well – sometimes demanding,” she said.

Han made her publishing debut as a poet in 1993. Her first short story collection was published in 1995 and her first novel, Black Deer, in 1998.

Several works are translated into English.

Her most recent novel, We Do Not Part, is due to be published in English next year. It also confronts a chapter in South Korea’s 20th-century history, which saw the country endure war, the division of the Korean peninsula and dictatorship. The novel deals with a 1948-1949 uprising on Jeju, an island south of the Korean mainland in which thousands of people were killed.

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Anders Karlsson, a lecturer at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies who has translated Han into Swedish, said he was “overjoyed” at the Nobel accolade.

He said Han’s “poignant, condensed” prose was able to describe “difficult and dark passages in South Korean history ... in quite open and inviting language that engages and does not deter the reader.”

The 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 — Han is only the 18th woman among its 120 laureates.

Six days of Nobel announcements opened on Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize.

Two founding fathers of machine learning – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – won the physics prize.

On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the chemistry prize.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Monday.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.6 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

AP