The Swedish Academy selected the 53-year-old author for her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life."
The academy praised her "unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead" as well as her "poetic and experimental style" that has made her an innovator in contemporary prose.
In addition to being the first South Korean laureate in literature, Han is also the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize in this category.
She joins the ranks of South Korea's only other Nobel laureate, late former President Kim Dae-jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000.
Best known for her surreal novel "The Vegetarian," which won the International Booker Prize in 2016, Han has received various literary awards both at home and abroad.
Her most recent accolade includes the Prix Médicis, an annual French award recognizing outstanding works of fiction, for her novel "We Do Not Part," which is based on the historical incident of a bloody anti-communist crackdown on Jeju Island in South Korea in 1948.
Born in the southwestern city of Gwangju in 1970, she studied Korean literature at Yonsei University.
The award ceremony will be held in the Swedish capital of Stockholm in December. Each prize winner receives 11 million Swedish krona, about US$1 million.
