The South Korean novelist Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction on for her surreal, unsettling novel, The Vegetarian.
The Vegetarian is Ms. Han’s first work to be translated into English. It was selected by a panel of five judges, who considered 155 novels in translation, and chosen over novels by more established writers, including Elena Ferrante’s “The Story of the Lost Child” and the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s “A Strangeness in My Mind.”
The prize, which is awarded jointly by Booker Prize Foundation and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, honors a single work that has been translated into English. The writer and translator share a cash prize of 50,000 British pounds, or about $72,000.
Ms. Han, a celebrated writer who has been publishing fiction and poetry for more than two decades, was almost entirely unknown to English-speakers when The Vegetarian was published by Portobello Books in 2015.
