London - Arab Today
South Korean author Han Kang's "The Vegetarian" wins the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for translated fiction.
The book was translated by Deborah Smith, who only started teaching herself Korean in 2010.
The Man Booker judges award the 72,000 dollars prize to Han and her translator, Briton Debbie Smith, for the "evocative and suggestive" short work, which "startles for the depths of its strangeness." The Vegetarian is a three-part novel which judges described as "concise, unsettling and beautifully composed" and an "uncanny blend of beauty and horror".
It tells of a Korean woman 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, particularly when the woman dreams obsessively about becoming a tree.
Source: QNA