The novelist Hangang was the first Korean to be awarded the prized Man Booker International Prize. The selection committee of Man Booker Prize presented “The Vegetarian”, which handled human violence and desire in a beautiful and grotesque way, in the 2016 awards ceremony or official dinner held in the Victoria & Albert Museum. The Man Booker Prize is considered as one of the three most prestigious worldwide literary awards in the English speaking world, along with the Nobel Prize and the French Competition Award. The writer and translator shared the honor and cash prize of 50,000 British pounds, or 86 million won in international fields.
  “The Vegetarian” was published in 2007, and is the story of a young traumatized woman approaching her death by going on an extreme vegetarian diet in order to reject violence. It is narrated in the view of three observers: her husband, older-sister, and brother-in-law. The protagonist Yeonghei wants to live by just drinking water, with her belief that she will become a tree by herself.

   Hangang explores the nature of human violence through the character Yeonghei. She revealed that the novel derived from a concern about a spectrum of humanity that believes we as humans are beings who could be rescuers of a young child fallen onto a railroad to slaughterers in Auschwitz prison camp. She added that she wanted to complete the question about whether we could endure our life in a world where violence and beauty co-exist.

     As soon as “The Vegetarian” was published outside of Korea in January 2015, it was given a favorable comment by the New York Times and The Guardian. These comments included that it is one of the most special examples of Korean literature, it has had an enormous effect as a breakthrough in American literature, and most of the reviewers were fascinated by its emotional writing style. Boyd Teonkin, the chairperson of the awarding committee, evaluated that this implicative, sophisticated, shocking novel showed bizarre harmony with beauty and horror. Jeong-gwari, the professor of Korean Literature in Yonsei University, mentioned that “The Vegetarian” maximizes the tension in a novel by handling a person who has a duality of an extreme pursuit to aestheticism as human nature and rejection to unshapeliness of desire.

Hangang was born as the daughter of novelist Han-seungwon in Gwangju in 1970. She graduated from a course in Korean literature in Yonsei University. Due to her short novel “Red Anchor”, she ascended the platform in an annual spring literary contest in 1997. Later, her work “Birthmark” was also a breakthrough after being selected as a Yi Sang Literary Award in 2005. She has received particular attention due to her poetic turn of mind, tragic world of art works, and highly evaluated symbolization. She is in office as a professor of literary writing in Seoul Institute of Arts. Literary critics defined her minutely descriptive work as a significant inquiry of life tragedy, corresponding with calm attention to look straight at a sore wound.

L.L.F. Reporter Hyeon-seul Lee