On this day in vegan history · May 16, 2016
A Novel About Refusing Meat Wins the Booker International
A quiet Korean novel about a woman who stops eating meat, and the violence her family inflicts on her for it, won Britain's biggest translation prize and put its author on the road to a Nobel.
The facts
- Date
- May 16, 2016
- Prize
- Man Booker International Prize, £50,000 split between author and translator
- Original title
- 채식주의자 (Chaesikjuuija), published in Korea in 2007
- Later honor
- Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature
On 16 May 2016, Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize in London, with the £50,000 prize split between Han and her translator, Deborah Smith. First published in Korean in 2007 as Chaesikjuuija and translated into English by Smith in 2015, the book follows Yeong-hye, a woman whose decision to stop eating meat after a nightmare about slaughter triggers escalating cruelty from her husband and father and a disturbing obsession from her brother-in-law. It was the first book to win the prize in its new, reconfigured form, honoring a single translated novel rather than an author's whole body of work. Eight years later, Han became the first South Korean and the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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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 Man Booker International Prize judging panel
Source: Wikipedia -
I am lucky to have met Deborah, a wonderful translator who can render subtlety and delicacy.
Han Kang, on translator Deborah Smith
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
A novel built entirely around one woman's refusal to eat animals, and the punishment the people closest to her hand out for it, became one of the most decorated works of world literature of the decade. It gave the choice not to eat meat a kind of moral seriousness in fiction that headlines rarely afford it.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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