Novelist Kang wins Man Booker International

Seoul

The book is a dark, surreal story about a woman who gives up eating meat and seeks to become a tree. The 45-year-old Han had been short-listed for the prize for fiction in translation to English along with Italian writer Elena Ferrante, Angola’s Jose Eduardo Agualusa, Chinese author Yan Lianke, Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk and Austrian Robert Seethaler.

“This compact, exquisite and disturbing book will linger long in the minds, and maybe the dreams, of its readers,” Boyd Tonkin, chairman of the 2016 judging panel, was cited by the foundation as saying. The novel was translated by Deborah Smith, a 28-year-old Briton who only began learning Korean when
she was 21. Han and Smith will split the (72,000 dollars) prize equally, according to the Booker Foundation, which administers the prize as well as the original Man Booker Prize for works in English and published in the United Kingdom, a prestigious award that typically leads to a surge in sales for its winner.

Han, who was born in the South Korean city of Gwangju, teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.