[Asia Economy Reporter Seo Mideum] Author Jeong Bora (46), who was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize with her short story collection Cursed Rabbit, did not win the award. It was anticipated that a Korean author would win for the first time in six years since Han Kang's The Vegetarian won in 2016, but unfortunately, Jeong came up short. The honor went to Indian author Geetanjali Shree for her work Tomb of Sand.
Six authors competed for the prize. Alongside Jeong Bora, the contenders included Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018, with The Books of Jacob; Norwegian author Jon Fosse with A New Name; Japanese author Kawakami Mieko with HEAVEN; Argentine author Claudia Pi?eiro with Elena Knows; and Indian author Geetanjali Shree with Tomb of Sand.
Jeong’s Cursed Rabbit is the only short story collection among the shortlisted works. It tells the story of a grandfather who creates cursed items to avenge a friend who was wrongfully ruined, crafting a cursed rabbit to carry out his revenge. The collection includes ten short stories such as the title story Cursed Rabbit, Head, Body, and Trap.
The Booker Prize judging panel previously praised Cursed Rabbit, stating that it “blends various elements such as horror, fantasy, and the surreal while instinctively rooting itself in the fears and pressures of everyday life.” They also noted that it “uses fantastic and surreal elements to address the very real fears and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society.”
Jeong Bora graduated from Yonsei University’s College of Humanities and earned a master’s degree in Russian and East European Studies from Yale University, followed by a PhD in Slavic Literature from Indiana University. She did not follow the traditional debut path. She won the Yonsei Literary Award in 1998 for the short story Head, included in Cursed Rabbit. Her first publication as an author was the short story Dead Red Bean in the quarterly Fantastic in 2008. She also received awards such as the Digital Literature Award (Honorable Mention for Novellas) in 2008 and the SF Award (Excellence Award for Novellas) in 2014.
The UK’s Booker Prize is considered one of the world’s top three literary awards alongside Sweden’s Nobel Prize in Literature and France’s Prix Goncourt. Until 2019, it was known as the Man Booker Prize. The International Booker Prize, established in 2005, is awarded to works translated into English by non-English-speaking authors. Anton Hur (real name Heo Jeongbeom, 41), who translated this book, was also nominated as a joint candidate, becoming the first Korean translator to receive such recognition. The prize money (?50,000, approximately 80 million KRW) is equally divided between the author and the translator who contributed to the work.
The first Korean to receive the Booker Prize was novelist Han Kang, who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian. Since then, Han Kang was shortlisted in 2018 for White, and Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk was longlisted in 2019, but neither won the prize.
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