The Booker Prize for British Literature, which played an important role in the international attention of Korea’s first Nobel Prize winner, welcomed the award on the 10th (local time), calling it “huge news.”
Immediately after the announcement of the award, the Booker Prize posted the news and photos of the award on its website, and posted a link to the interview it had with the Booker Prize team last year. He also shared a post by the Nobel Prize committee on social networking services (SNS), saying, “How wonderful is this news?”
The Booker Prize is a prestigious literary award in the United Kingdom. Han became the first Korean to win the Man Booker International (currently the International Booker Prize), an international category of the Booker Prize, for “The Vegetarian” in 2016. In 2018, the novel “White” was a shortlist.
When asked what the vegetarian award meant to her in a July interview with the Booker Prize, she said, “I thought it was a bit strange in a good way at the time. I am grateful that she helped my work reach a wide audience of readers from other cultures.” The relationship between Han and the Booker Prize does not stop there. Max Porter, a novelist who led the judging panel of the International Booker Prize next year, contributed to the publication of the translation into English by a vegetarian when he was working as an editor of a publishing company. “Han Kang is a writer and an essential voice of a special human being, and his work is a gift for all of us,” Porter said on the day. “I am so excited that he has been recognized by the Nobel Committee. New readers will discover his miraculous work and change it.”
In July last year, when the Booker Prize selected vegetarians as the recommended book of the month, he revealed the backstory of the vegan translation in detail to the Booker Prize. According to Potter’s contribution to the Booker Prize at the time, when he attended an event at the London Book Fair in 2013, a woman named Deborah Smith approached him and published seven Korean-English translations of the vegetarian.
“It was scary, shocking, elegant, radical and beautiful,” Potter said, explaining that Portobello Books, which he was involved in, signed a British copyright contract and asked Deborah Smith to translate it. “At the time, there was not much opposition, but there was a little bit,” he said. “Everyone agreed that the translation sample was a special and important book, but some felt too strange to predict that it would be commercially successful.”
During the translation process, she sat down with Smith holding a pencil and reviewed and revised the translation, and sent it to Han, who accepted or rejected the translation. “I wanted to avoid cultural stereotypes of translated novels,” Potter said. “I didn’t want the fact that it was a Korean novel to have a bigger weight than the fact that it was a surprisingly good novel, but I wanted it to look fresh and challenging.” She wanted to make the book into a book that can be read by British readers.
Not only Booker’s side but also fellow writers congratulated him. “Han Kang is an outstanding novelist who reflects our modern situation with courage, imagination and intelligence,” Korean-American writer Lee Min-jin said in a statement to Yonhap News. “He deserves global recognition.”
The publisher of Random House, which has published major works of Han Kang in the U.S., also posted a congratulatory message on Instagram along with a picture of Han Kang. “My heartfelt congratulations to our beloved author Han Kang who was chosen as the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature,” the publisher wrote. “Everyone at Hogarth is very proud to publish your great work in English.”
SALLY LEE
US ASIA JOURNAL
