Literature in translation has long been reliant on indie presses to bring work such as the South Korean author’s to wider audiences
Han Kang has been named the 2024 Nobel Literature laureate. Her work was first published in the UK by Portobello Books.Han Kang has been named the 2024 Nobel Literature laureate. Her work was first published in the UK by Portobello Books.
Though Han’s most recent work has been published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Random House, her first novel, The Vegetarian, published in South Korea in 2007, was published by the now defunct independent Portobello Books in 2015. It won the International Booker Prize the following year.Now Han’s entire output has been honoured: works of spare, fierce prose, deceptively ethereal in transmission yet brutal in impact.
The Vegetarian, which shocked many readers and critics with its explicit imagery, is perhaps her best-known work, a study of violent individual resistance against an oppressive society. In the novel, a young, outwardly conventional woman shocks her family and new husband by refusing to eat meat, only to find herself dangerously unmoored in a disapproving, carnivorous and patriarchal world.
The prize win made headlines as it heralded the dual partnership of Han and translator Deborah Smith, at the time a PhD student who had learned Korean from scratch three years earlier. Smith used her share of the £50,000 prize to set up Tilted Axis Press, which focuses solely on literature in translation from east Asian writers. She went on to translate two further novels of Han’s.
Both Human Acts and The White Book, a brief, deeply affecting novel of grief, transmutation and healing, which meditates on the life and death of a newborn sister, were also brought out by Portobello. By this time there had been some heated public criticism over Smith’s method of translation – or “mistranslation” – of The Vegetarian, following articles by the critic and author Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books and academic Chanse Yun in the LA Times.
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