South Korean author beats Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa to win prestigious prize

South Korean author Han Kang was awarded Britain's Man Booker International Prize for fiction, for her novel The Vegetarian.

The first South Korean to win the award, Kang beats writers like Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and international bestseller Elena Ferrante to the Man Booker International prize.

The Vegetarian, unanimously selected by a panel of five judges, tells the story of a woman who decides to give up eating meat and faces devastating consequences.

The work features a protagonist who doesn't want to belong to the human race anymore, Kang said.

It tells of “a completely ordinary wife” who decides to become a vegetarian as she seeks a more “plant-like” existence. The controversial decision provokes cruelty from her husband and from her father, and obsession from her sister’s husband, as the woman, Yeong-hye, dreams obsessively about becoming a tree.

The chairman of the judges, Boyd Tonkin, described the novel as "lyrical and lacerating" - a tale of "volcanic, visceral intensity".

Han Kang will split the $72,000 (21 million Naira) prize with her translator, Deborah Smith, who taught herself to read Korean just three years before.

At the prize ceremony, held at the Victoria & Albert museum in London on Monday night, Han told the Guardian she felt “extremely honoured”. She added: “It is a very precious thing – winning this prize, my friendship with Deborah. This book and this prize has bought me many things.”

The Vegetarian was one of 155 books submitted for the Man Booker International. This is the first year the Man Booker International has been awarded to a single book, rather than a body of work, following its merger with the Independent foreign fiction prize.

Previous winners of the Man Booker International include Philip Roth, Chinua Achebe and László Krasznahorkai.

READ: