South Korean author Han Kang and her translator Deborah Smith have won the Man Booker International prize 2016 with the novel The Vegetarian.
Han shares the £50,000 award (€64,000) with Smith, who only learned South Korean seven years ago. The judges described The Vegetarian as “concise, unsettling and beautifully composed” and an “uncanny blend of beauty and horror.”
In the three-part tale of family fragmentation, the wife of the piece, Yeong-hye becomes a vegetarian because she seeks a more “plant-like” existence. Her audacious decision is greeted by her husband and father with acts of cruelty, while her sister’s husband becomes obsessed with her decision.
Chair of judges Boyd Tonkin described The Vegetarian as "almost an outlandish story - a story that could topple over into crude horror or melodrama, or just over-emphatic allegories", but one that had "extraordinary poise and tact and control."
"That’s done both by Han Kang and by this amazing translation from Deborah Smith, " continued Tonkin.
Tonkin also described The Vegetarian “an unforgettably powerful and original novel. Told in three voices, from three different perspectives.
28-year old winning translator Deborah Smith became an English-Korean translator after she completed her undergraduate degree seven years ago. She moved to Korea to study the language and she has also translated Han’s previous novel Human Acts.
The Vegetarian was one of 155 books submitted for the Man Booker International, whose whittled-down shortlist also featured the last novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, The Story of a Lost Child, and Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind.
This is the first year the Man Booker International has been awarded to a single book, rather than a body of work, following a merger with the Independent foreign fiction prize. A recent survey has revealed that translated fiction now exceeds sales of English fiction in the UK.
