logo

English
                 


Han Kang Wins Man Booker International Prize

for Fiction With ‘The Vegetarian’






The South Korean novelist Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction on Tuesday for her surreal, unsettling novel, “The Vegetarian,” about a woman who believes she is turning into a tree.Widely praised by critics in the United States and Britain, “The Vegetarian” is Ms. Han’s first work to be translated into English. It was selected by a panel of five judges, who considered 155 novels in translation, and chosen over novels by more established writers, including Elena Ferrante’s “The Story of the Lost Child” and the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s “A Strangeness in My Mind.”

The prize, which is awarded jointly by Booker Prize Foundation and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, honors a single work that has been translated into English. The writer and translator share a cash prize of 50,000 British pounds, or about $72,000.Ms. Han, a celebrated writer who has been publishing fiction and poetry for more than two decades, was almost entirely unknown to English-speakers when “The Vegetarian” was published by Portobello Books in 2015. (It was released in the United States earlier this year, by Hogarth.) The novel had an unusual path to publication.

Deborah Smith, a 28-year-old British translator, read a Korean edition of “The Vegetarian” about four years ago when she was studying for her Ph.D., and decided to send a sample translation to a British publisher, who was won over by the first 10 pages.

The novel, which unfolds in three parts, centers on a depressed South Korean housewife named Yeong-hye, whose violent nightmares lead her to stop eating meat. Her husband and father view her vegetarianism as a subversive act, while her brother-in-law becomes sexually fixated with her plant-shaped birthmark. Yeong-hye begins starving herself, believing that she can photosynthesize light and transform herself into a tree.

In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, Ms. Han said the novel grew partly out of her fascination with the Gwangju uprising in 1980, when pro-democracy demonstrations turned bloody after government troops attacked protesters. Though she was just 9 at the time, the event profoundly shaped her understanding of the human capacity for violence but also for self-sacrifice and compassion, she said.
 
With “The Vegetarian,” she aimed to explore what it would mean for a person to live a completely nonviolent life, by eschewing food. The novel, which grew out of a short story she wrote around 1998, was inspired in part by a line from the Korean poet Yi Sang, who wrote, “I believe that humans should be plants.”Ms. Han said, “I was thinking about the spectrum of human behavior, from sublimity to horror, and wondered, is it really possible for humans to live a perfectly innocent life in this violent world, and what would happen if someone tried to achieve that?”

By ALEXANDRA ALTERMAY 17, 2016,NY Times



Photo and Text from Internet,Webpage by Kyu Hwang, May 18,,2016
 

No. Subject Date Author Last Update Views
Notice How to write your comments onto a webpage [2] 2016.07.06 운영자 2016.11.20 18193
Notice How to Upload Pictures in webpages 2016.07.06 운영자 2018.10.19 32347
Notice How to use Rich Text Editor [3] 2016.06.28 운영자 2018.10.19 5924
Notice How to Write a Webpage 2016.06.28 운영자 2020.12.23 43840
8843 연꽃 따는 노래 2024.05.01 정관호*63 2024.05.01 13
8842 훈민정음의 비밀 [5] 2024.04.25 운영자 2024.05.01 60
8841 부산정치파동과 미국의 이승만 제거계획 2024.04.25 온기철*71 2024.04.25 22
8840 코너킥으로 웃었다... 황선홍호, 일본 제압하고 8강으로 [5] 2024.04.22 황규정*65 2024.04.25 30
8839 [시조]懷古歌: 회고가 [1] 2024.04.21 정관호*63 2024.04.21 12
8838 부산형무소 살해사건 2024.04.20 온기철*71 2024.04.20 18
8837 육군 방첩대. 미군 CIC, 그리고 김창룡 2024.04.17 온기철*71 2024.04.25 20
8836 김구의 일생과 암살의 원인 2024.04.14 온기철*71 2024.04.25 18
8835 OPERA MIGNON: Connais tu le pays [1] 2024.04.12 정관호*63 2024.04.12 25
8834 “쏘니,너와 함께 뛴건 행운!”, 400경기 감동 축하영상 [5] 2024.04.06 황규정*65 2024.04.22 33
8833 길에서 만난 한식 [1] 2024.04.03 정관호*63 2024.04.09 33
8832 돌아오는 기러기 [1] file 2024.03.27 정관호*63 2024.04.18 46
8831 이강인-손흥민 ‘골 합작’ 한국, 태국 3-0 완승…월드컵 최종 예선 진출 성큼 [2] 2024.03.26 황규정*65 2024.03.27 43
8830 1945년 8월 15일 오후 강릉 홍제정 안마을에서 [2] 2024.03.19 정관호*63 2024.03.24 76
8829 이승만은 왜 김구를 제거 했을까? [1] 2024.03.17 온기철*71 2024.03.18 52
8828 My Grandson [1] 2024.03.15 노영일*68 2024.03.18 107
8827 蜀相(촉상): 촉한 승상 제갈량 [1] 2024.03.15 정관호*63 2024.04.12 59
8826 1945년 8월15일에는 서울에 아무일도 없었다. [1] 2024.03.13 온기철*71 2024.03.14 53
8825 왕소군 고향에서 [1] 2024.03.08 정관호*63 2024.03.20 58
8824 정약용; 늙어가면 친구가 점점 없어진다. [5] 2024.03.06 온기철*71 2024.03.08 93