Han Kang¡¯s eminence in the literary world was reaffirmed by the Swedish Academy¡¯s announcement on Thursday that she will be conferred this year¡¯s Nobel Prize in Literature.
Though she has been publishing in her native South Korea since the early 1990s, the 53-year-old Han was virtually unknown to Western readers until the English translation of ¡°The Vegetarian¡± in 2016. Her meteoric rise since attests to the outsize influence that individual translators can exert on the literary world and a burgeoning global interest in East Asian storytelling.
Deborah Smith, the British translator of ¡°The Vegetarian,¡± decided to learn Korean in 2009 on a lark. Freshly graduated from college, she found herself floundering in the wake of the global financial crisis and thought that learning a language would be ¡°.¡± She chose Korean specifically because there was ¡°barely anything available in English ... so the work had to be out there.¡±
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.