Discover our July Book of the Month: The Vegetarian

This month we’re casting a fresh eye over Han Kang’s novel, translated by Deborah Smith, which won the International Booker Prize in 2016

Terrifying, shocking, elegant, radical, beautiful, unforgettable.

There are many words to describe Han Kang’s International Booker Prize-winning novel, The Vegetarian – and those six words come courtesy of Max Porter, who, together with the team at Portobello Books, commissioned Deborah Smith’s English translation and helped turn the book into a critically-acclaimed bestseller.   

Han Kang’s novel is, on the surface, about a woman who has stopped eating meat; a woman who thinks she is turning into a plant. It’s also a book about shame, desire, our faltering attempts to understand the lives of others and about what happens when a person stops living their life according to convention and the expectations of those around them. 

Yeong-hye and her husband are an ordinary couple living in modern-day South Korea. She is an uninspired but dutiful wife; he is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners. But then Yeong-hye commits a shocking act of subversion: overnight, she vows to give up eating meat. Despite her husband and family’s attempts to intervene and force her to come to her senses, her rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms. Gradually, Yeong-hye spirals further and further into her fantasies in the hope of abandoning her fleshly constraints altogether.

As we unveil The Vegetarian as our Book of the Month for July, Porter has written an essay for the Booker Prizes website in which he explains not only how the English edition was commissioned, edited and marketed, but how important it was that the book reached an audience who might have felt that translated fiction was not for them. 

‘The book,’ Porter recalls, ‘found many readers. Perhaps it brought Korean literature, or novels about transgressive experience, or translated fiction in general, to a wider audience, or a younger audience, and that can only be a good thing.’ He also acknowledges that the success of The Vegetarian chimes with recent research compiled by Nielsen on behalf of the Booker Prize Foundation, which has shown that ‘readers of translated fiction in the UK are significantly younger than readers of fiction generally, with sales increasing’. 

If you haven’t yet read the book – or if you’re considering re-reading it this month – our comprehensive reading guide provides biographies, resources and comments from critics, as well as from the author and translator themselves, plus a selection of detailed discussion points to enhance your reading experience. To whet your appetite further, we’ve published an extract from the book on our website, to help you decide whether this is the kind of novel you’d like to sink your teeth into or not. 

As with our previous Books of the Month, we’d like you to join us in reading it – or re-reading it – so please share your opinions in the comments or via our social channels (@TheBookerPrizes). 

If you’d like to win a copy of the latest UK edition, published by Granta, along with a limited-edition, money-can’t-buy Booker Prize tote bag, enter our competition here. We have five copies and five bags to give away.

And if you’d like to hear what Jo Hamya and James Walton, the hosts of The Booker Prize Podcast, have to say about the book, listen to our brand new episodes when they go live this Thursday.