The Vegetarian

The Vegetarian is a novel by the South Korean writer Han Kang, published in Korean in 2007 under the title Chaesikjuuija. It follows Yeong-hye, an unremarkable Seoul housewife, who abruptly and without explanation stops eating meat after a series of disturbing dreams involving animal slaughter, a decision that her husband and family treat not as a personal choice but as an intolerable rupture, and that draws Yeong-hye into an escalating personal and psychological transformation with devastating consequences for her marriage and family. Told across three linked sections narrated by different family members rather than by Yeong-hye herself, the novel builds from its ordinary domestic premise toward an increasingly stark exploration of bodily autonomy, violence and withdrawal from a demanding social world. Its English translation by Deborah Smith won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, the first year the prize was reconfigured to honor a single translated novel rather than a body of work, and Han Kang went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, the first South Korean and first Asian woman to receive it.