Han Kang’s Nobel win underscores essential role of translators as literary tastemakers

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 “useful and enjoyable.” She chose Korean specifically because there was “barely anything available in English … so the work had to be out there.”