The prestigious Man Booker International Prize has been bestowed on South Korean author Han Kang for her novel 'The Vegetarian' that deals with a woman's rejection to human brutality who later gives up on consuming meat.
Some of the eminent writes that Kang won over include Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and international bestseller Elena Ferrante. She has won the 50,000-pound award last night which she shared with her the novel's translator Deborah Smith.
The Vegetarian that is published by Portobello Books, was selected unanimously among 155 books by a panel of five judges headed by noted critic and editor Boyd Tonkin who described Kang's work as 'lyrical and lacerating'.
Forty five year old Kang currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts, is already very popular in South Korea. She has won Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award too.
The Vegetarian is Kang's first novel to be translated into English by 28-year-old Smith who started learning Korean only at the age of 21 and will share the 50,000-pound award with Kang.
The Vegetarian follows the story of Yeong-hye, a dutiful Korean wife who, spurred on by a dream, decides one day to become a vegetarian, something that is extremely uncommon in the South Korean society.
The novel describes how this act fractures her familial life and affects her relationships with the people around her, including her sister and her brother-in-law, an artist who becomes obsessed with her.
Celebrating the finest global fiction in translation, the Man Booker International Prize awards both author and translator 25,000 pounds, along with a newly designed trophy.
They have also received a further 1,000 pound each for being shortlisted. There were no Indian authors in the race for the prize this year.
This is the first year that the Man Booker International Prize has been awarded on the basis of a single book, after having joined forces with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize last year.
In its prior form honouring a whole body of work published either originally in English or available in translation in the English language, the prize was awarded to Ismail Kadare in 2005, Chinua Achebe in 2007, Alice Munro in 2009, Philip Roth in 2011, Lydia Davis in 2013, and Laszlo Krasznahorkai in 2015.
