{"id":25412,"date":"2016-05-17T04:35:36","date_gmt":"2016-05-17T04:35:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/south-korea-s-han-kang-wins-booker-international\/"},"modified":"2016-05-17T04:35:26","modified_gmt":"2016-05-17T04:35:26","slug":"south-korea-s-han-kang-wins-booker-international","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/south-korea-s-han-kang-wins-booker-international\/","title":{"rendered":"South Korea’s Han Kang wins Booker International prize"},"content":{"rendered":"

{Han Kang’s allegorical tale wins literary prize, which for the first time will be split evenly with the translator.}<\/p>\n

South Korean author Han Kang has won the Man Booker International Prize, sharing the \u00a350,000 ($72,000) award with her translator – who had only taught herself Korean three years before.<\/p>\n

Han 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.<\/p>\n

“I’m so honoured” she told AFP news agency. “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.<\/p>\n

“Through this extreme narrative I felt I could question … the difficult question of being human.”<\/p>\n

She is the first South Korean to win the prize.<\/p>\n

Described as “lyrical and lacerating” by chairman of the judges Boyd Tonkin, the tale traces the story of an ordinary woman’s rejection of convention from three different perspectives.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“This is a book of tenderness and terror,” Boyd told guests at the award ceremony dinner at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.<\/p>\n

{{Translation recognition}}<\/p>\n

For the first time this year, the award went jointly to the translator, Deborah Smith, 28, who only started learning Korean three years before she embarked on the translation.<\/p>\n

“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. <\/p>\n

“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 said.<\/p>\n

“It felt as though I looked up almost every other word in the dictionary. It felt a bit like climbing a mountain. But at the same time just falling into this world that was so atmospheric and disturbing and moving – it was a wonderful experience.”<\/p>\n

The international edition of Britain’s Man Booker Prize was introduced in 2005 and up to now has been awarded in recognition of a body of work by a living author whose work was written or available in English.<\/p>\n

But from this year, it will be presented annually for a single work of fiction that has been translated into English and published in Britain.<\/p>\n

\"Nominated<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

{Han Kang’s allegorical tale wins literary prize, which for the first time will be split evenly with the translator.} South Korean author Han Kang has won the Man Booker International Prize, sharing the \u00a350,000 ($72,000) award with her translator – who had only taught herself Korean three years before. Han Kang, 45, an author and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[101],"byline":[2474],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-25412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-internationl","byline-al-jazeera"],"bylines":[{"id":2474,"name":"AL JAZEERA","slug":"al-jazeera","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"contributors":[{"id":2474,"name":"AL JAZEERA","slug":"al-jazeera","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25412\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25412"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=25412"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=25412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}