STOCKHOLM —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.

The winner follows Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who was honored last year for writing in Nynorsk, one of the two official written versions of the Norwegian language, that prize organizers said gives "voice to the unsayable."

Six days of Nobel announcements opened 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 Tuesday. On Wednesday, three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

AP