SEOUL, South Korea – South Koreans woke up Friday to learn that local author Han Kang had won the Nobel Prize for literature – a breakthrough achievement that ignited an outburst of intense national pride.

At a central Seoul cafe hours after the honor for the 53-year-old novelist and poet was announced, an elderly gentleman could be seen approaching patrons brandishing a copy of the Chosun Ilbo, Korea’s best-selling newspaper. Plastered across the entire width of the front page was a huge image of Ms. Han and an insert of her most famous novel, ‘The Vegetarian.”

“Have you seen this?” he beamed.

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The Chosun Ilbo was not alone: Every other major paper carried similar front page stories on the news of the first South Korean to claim the literary world’s grandest honor.

Business was boomin at the capital’s massive Kyobo Book Store. The outlet had taken note of the Swedish Academy’s decision – the news broke late, Korea-time, on Thursday – and piled up copies of the author’s works in hopes of a sales bonanza on Friday morning.

The hopes paid off. Between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., the bookstore, which for years carried images of Nobel Prize winners on its walls with an empty frame for a Korean winner, had reportedly moved 130,000 copies of Ms. Han’s works.

Even South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol weighed in with a congratulatory message.

The widespread delight at the recognition was understandable. South Korea, the world’s 14th largest economy and a powerhouse of industrial manufacturing, high technologies and creative cultural content, has long sought recognition by the Swedish Academy. Ms. Han’s is only the country’s second Nobel honoree, following the Nobel Peace Prize awarded for the former President Kim Dae-jung in 2000 — a quarter-century ago.

Ms. Han treads a similar terrain to the late Mr. Kim.

The latter shattered all precedents with peacemaking overtures to North Korea’s leader, but prior to that, had a long, distinguished and bruising career as a political activist.

Mr. Kim, like hundreds of thousands of student demonstrators, had arrayed himself against the authoritarian governments that ruled South Korea until democratic elections were finally granted in 1987.

Ms. Kang’s best-known works cover Korean authoritarianism in multiple shapes and forms, in language not always flattering to her native land.

“You converted the painful wounds of our modern history into great literature,” Mr. Yoon wrote in his presidential congratulatory message.

There is some irony: Many of those wounds were inflicted by the predecessors of the right-wing People Power Party that today constitutes Mr. Yoon’s political machine.

Ms. Han’s latest novel – translation pending — covers the 1948 Jeju Massacre, in which government security forces brutally suppressed a communist, leaving the southern island utterly devastated. The horrors were covered up for decades.

Her 2014 novel “Human Acts” covers the Gwangju Uprising. There, in 1980, where a would-be coup sparked bloody clashes between troops and pro-democracy protesters in the southwestern Korean city. Hundreds were killed in an event that haunts South Koreans to this day.

Ms. Han is herself a native of Gwangju.

Her breakout and best-known novel, 2007’s “The Vegetarian,”details a woman’s downward spiral into a mental abyss. The work references Japanese colonialism and features the paternal violence deployed by her father, a Vietnam veteran.

The Nobel literature prize will bring huge new attention to Ms. Kang, but is not her first big global recognition. In 2016, she won the International Booker prize, earning her global kudos in academia and literatary criticism circles. The higher-profile Nobel could, feasibly, raise her star further. However,  her Kafka-esque novels are challenging and a film version of “The Vegetarian” was not a hit.

It remains to be seen if K-literature will earn the same soft-power global prominence as K-pop, K-drama and K-film.

“Korean popular culture has been quite popular abroad partially because it’s similar enough to Western pop culture to be legible, but different enough to provide some freshness,” said CedarBough Saeji, a professor of Korean studies at Busan National University. “Korean literature, however, is a different cup of tea. … Few popular Korean novels are bright or cheerful, or clear stories of good and bad.”

Unlike the breezy beats of K-pop, or the upscale optics of K-drama, Ms. Han’s works are not the kind of sugary representations approved and leveraged by South Korea’s tourism promoters.

It does mark the latest soft-power win for the South Korean art scene, which has scored a number of global triumphs in recent years. And some of the biggest successes offer an unsentimental view of South Korean life.

The first K-pop hit to storm the West was Psy’s “Gangnam Style” in 2012. It blended an irresistible refrain with a satiric takedown of the nouveau riche pretensions prevalent in the southern Seoul district.  

Director Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” seven years later became the first non-American film to win the Best Picture Oscar. A dark, violent comedy-drama, it probed the cleavage between Seoul’s rich and poor.

In a similar vein, the 2021 Netflix international hit “Squid Game” was an ultra-brutal series about the exploitation of the poor and hopeless by powerful elites.

“As with ‘Gangnam Style’ and ‘Parasite,’ the best of Korean culture touches truth and reality rather than superficial promotion,” said Michael Breen, author of “The New Koreans.” “It’s a measure of Korean confidence in its development that pride in this sort of recognition is patriotic, rather than nationalistic.”