South Korean author Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize on Monday, sharing the £50,000 ($72,000) award with her translator — who had only taught herself Korean three years before.
South Korean author Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize on Monday, sharing the £50,000 ($72,000) award with her translator — who had only taught herself Korean three years before.
Han Kang, 45, an author and creative writing teacher who is already successful in South Korea, is likely to enjoy a spike in international sales following the win for The Vegetarian.
“I’m so honoured” she told AFP. “The work features a protagonist who wants to become a plant, and to leave the human race to save herself from the dark side of human nature. Through this extreme narrative I felt I could question the difficult question of being human.”
She was the first South Korean to win the prize. Described as “lyrical and lacerating” by chairman of the judges Boyd Tonkin, the tale traces the story of an ordinary woman’s rejection of convention from three different perspectives.
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.
“This is a book of tenderness and terror,” Boyd told guests at the award ceremony dinner at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
For the first time this year, the award went jointly to the translator, Deborah Smith, 28, who only started learning Korean three years before she embarked on the translation.
“This was the first book that I ever translated, and the best possible thing that can happen to a translator has just happened to me,” an emotional Smith told AFP.
