Författaren Han Kangtilldelades
i år det prestigefulla priset The Man Booker International Prize i den
skönlitterära klassen för sin roman The Vegetarian.
Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and
moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at
Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the
Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English,was published by Portobello Books in 2015.
Förlagstext om romanen: Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an
office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an
uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage
is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more ‘plant-like’ existence,
commits a shocking act of subversion. As her rebellion manifests in ever
more bizarre and frightening forms, Yeong-hye spirals further and
further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming
– impossibly, ecstatically – a tree. Fraught, disturbing, and
beautiful, The Vegetarianis a novel about modern
day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire, and our faltering
attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.
Boktitel: The Vegetarian Författare: Han Kang Översättare: Deborah Smith Bokförlag: Portobello Books
Översättaren Deborah Smith
Deborah Smith (28) was monolingual until the age of 21. Deciding to
become a translator upon finishing her degree in English Literature,
with no previous experience in this field, she chose to pursue Korean
due to a lack of English-Korean translators. Her translations from
Korean include Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Human Acts, and Bae Suah’s The Essayist’s Desk and The Low Hills of Seoul.
She recently founded Tilted Axis Press, a not-for-profit publishing
house focusing on translations from Asia and Africa. She tweets as
@londonkoreanist
