– Screen grab from List.or.krSEOUL, May 17 – South Korean author Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction yesterday for her novel The Vegetarian, a dark, surreal story about a woman who gives up eating meat and seeks to become a tree.
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South Korean fiction writer Han Kang reads parts of her book “The Vegetarian” in a book event in London on May 15, 2016.
It was picked unanimously by the panel of five judges, beating six other novels including The Story of the Lost Child by Italian sensation Elena Ferrante and A Strangeness in My Mind by Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk.
Literary critic Boyd Tonkin, chair of the panel that chose the victor from 155 entries, said Han’s “compact, exquisite and disturbing” novel displayed an “uncanny blend of beauty and horror”.
Smith, the 28-year-old translator, was monolingual until the age of 21.
The worldwide edition of Britain’s Man Booker Prize was introduced in 2005 and up to now has been awarded in recognition of a body of work by a living author whose work was written or available in English.
Smith, whose only language was English until she was 21, chose to become a translator on finishing her English Literature degree having noticed the lack of English-Korean translators. It tells the tale of a dutiful Korean housewife, Yeong-hye, who, spurred on by a dream, decides to become a vegetarian to embrace a more “plant-like” existence.
The writer and her British translator will split the award’s £50,000 prize money.
This subversive act fractures her familial life and, as Yeong-hye’s rebellion manifests in increasingly freakish and frightening forms, turns seemingly ordinary relationships into those driven by violence, shame and desire. This is the first year the prize was awarded on the basis of a single book instead of an author’s body of work.
She was the first South Korean to win the prize.
Han and Smith’s win was announced by critic and editor Boyd Tonkin during a dinner at the V&A. “In a style both lyrical and lacerating, it reveals the impact of this great refusal both on the heroine herself and on those around her”.
The top prize of ￡50,000 (US$70,995) will be equally divided and given to the author and the translator. This compact, exquisite and disturbing book will linger long in the minds, and maybe the dreams, of its readers.
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He also said, “Deborah Smith’s perfectly judged translation matches its uncanny blend of beauty and horror at every turn”. Previous winners of the Man Booker International include Philip Roth, Chinua Achebe and László Krasznahorkai. “The prize underscores Man Group’s charitable focus on literacy and education and, together with the wider charitable activities of the Booker Prize Foundation, plays a very important role in promoting literary excellence on a global scale that we are honoured to support”.
