South Korea’s Han Kang Wins Booker International Prize

Seoul: South Korean author Han Kang has won the Man Booker International Prize, becoming the first South Korean to win the prize.

Kang shared the £50,000 ($72,000) award with her translator — who had only taught herself Korean three years before.

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 her book, The Vegetarian.

“I’m so honored” she said after winning the award. “The work features a protagonist who wants to become a plant, and to leave the human race to save herself from the dark side human nature. Through this extreme narrative I felt I could question...the difficult question of being human.”

Described as “lyrical and lacerating” by chairman of the judges Boyd Tonkin, The Vegetarian traces the story of an ordinary woman’s rejection of convention from three different perspectives. “This is a book of tenderness and terror,” Boyd told guests at the award ceremony dinner at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

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.

For the first time this year, the award went jointly to the translator, Deborah Smith, 28. “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,” she said. “When I was 22 I decided to teach myself Korean...I felt that I was limited by only being able to speak English. I’d always read a lot of translations, and you get the sense of this whole world being out there, very different perspectives, different stories,” she added.