WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people - dutiful wife and mild-mannered office worker. One day, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye decides to become a vegetarian.

But in South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, it is a shocking act of subversion. Yeong-hye's passive rebellion rapidly manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, from sexual sadism to attempted suicide, and in increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks, as all the while she spirals further into her fantasies.

Disturbing and beautiful by turns, The Vegetarian is a revelatory novel about modern day South Korea; a tale of shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others.

Media Reviews:

A strange, painfully tender exploration of the brutality of desire indulged and the fatality of desire ignored... Exquisite - Eimear McBride, Baileys Women's Prize-winning author, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

The Vegetarian is a story about metamorphosis, rage and the desire for another sort of life. It is written in cool, still, poetic but matter-of-fact short sentences, translated luminously by Deborah Smith, who is obviously a genius - Deborah Levy, author, Swimming Home

[The Vegetarian] is understated even in its most fevered, violent moments. It has a surreal and spellbinding quality. Enthralling - Arifa Akbar, Independent

It's a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader's diet. It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions. Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience. [It] will be hard to beat - Daniel Hahn, Guardian

Shocking... The writing throughout is precise and spare, with not a word wasted. There are no tricks. Han holds the reader in a vice grip... The Vegetarian quickly settles into a dark, menacing brilliance that is similar to the work of the gifted Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa in its devastating study of psychological pain... [It] is more than a cautionary tale about the brutal treatment of women: it is a meditation on suffering and grief. It is about escape and how a dreamer takes flight. Most of all, it is about the emptiness and rage of discovering there is nothing to be done when all hope and comfort fails... A work of savage beauty and unnerving physicality. Mind-blowing - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

Han Kang

Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and grew up in Seoul. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University and has taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

In 1993, Kang made her literary debut by publishing five poems in Munhak-gwa-sahoe (Literature and Society), and her debut novel Black Deer came out in 1998. Her third novel, The Vegetarian, published in Korean in 2007 and in English translation in 2015 won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, becoming a perennial bestseller and rocketing her to international fame. Kang has published several short story and essay collections and her other novels include Human Acts (2016), the autobiographical The White Book (2017) and Greek Lessons (2023). Her most recent novel We Do Not Part has won two international literary prizes – the Medicis Prize in 2023 and the Émile Guimet Prize in 2024 – and is published in English translation in 2025.

Han Kang has won several literary awards both in South Korea and internationally, and in October 2024, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for ‘her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’.