‘The Vegetarian’ by Han Kang voted top favorite among Int’l Booker Prize winners

Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian” has been chosen as readers’ favorite among International Booker Prize winning titles, underscoring the enduring global resonance of the unsettling novel a decade after its win. To mark the 10th anniversary of the prize in its current format, organizers invited readers to vote online between February and April on the 10 winning titles from 2016 to 2025. Nearly 10,000 people took part, with almost one-third selecting “The Vegetarian” as their favorite, the prize committee announced Monday, U.K. time. First published in Korean in 2007 and translated into English by Deborah Smith in 2015, “The Vegetarian” became Han’s first book to reach English-speaking readers and went on to clinch the International Booker (then the Man Booker International Prize) the following year. The novel follows Yeong-hye, a seemingly ordinary woman who refuses to eat meat and steadily “naturalizes” herself in a disturbing rebellion against patriarchal and human-centered violence. At the time, judges praised it as “concise yet elaborate, and at the same time shocki

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