Jeong Bora's 'Jeojutokki' Advances to Final Round of Booker Prize, One of the World's Top 3 Literary Awards (Comprehensive)

[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Seo Mideum] Author Jeong Bora (46·photo)'s work The Curse Rabbit (Ajac) has been included among the six finalists for the International Booker Prize, the UK's most prestigious literary award.

According to the Booker Prize Foundation on the 7th (local time), Jeong Bora's The Curse Rabbit was selected as one of the six finalists in the International Booker category. The International category targets English translations of works by non-English-speaking authors. The Booker Prize is considered one of the world's top three literary awards alongside the Nobel Prize in Literature and the French Prix Goncourt. Park Sangyoung (34)'s Love in the Big City (Changbi), which was also shortlisted in the first round alongside Jeong, did not make it to the final list.

Jeong's The Curse Rabbit (Ajac), which advanced to the final round, is a collection of ten short stories including the title story about a rabbit lantern created by an old man who casts a curse to avenge a friend; the lantern comes to life and devours everything the target of revenge possesses. The Booker Foundation praised the work for highlighting realistic fears, brutal modern patriarchy, and capitalism through fantastic and surreal elements.

Jeong Bora graduated from the Department of Humanities at Yonsei University, earned a master's degree in Russian and East European Studies from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Slavic Literature from Indiana University. Until now, she had not undergone any official literary debut process nor received any special literary awards.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

The person who introduced her to the world is translator Heo Jeongbeom (41, Anton Heo). He took charge of translating Jeong's work and reached the Booker Prize finals together. In a media interview, he said, "In 2018, I could not pass by after reading the beautiful sentences of The Curse Rabbit at the Wow Book Festival booth." Heo also translated Park Sangyoung's Love in the Big City, marking the first time that Korean works translated by the same translator were both nominated for the Booker Prize.

Although Heo is often mistaken as a Korean foreigner due to his translation name Anton Heo, he is actually a native Korean who even served in the military. Born in Sweden, he traveled extensively to places such as Hong Kong, Ethiopia, and Thailand following his father, who was an overseas employee, but he completed all his elementary, middle, high school, and university education in Korea.

Previously, novelist Han Kang won this award in 2016 with The Vegetarian, and Hwang Sok-yong's At Dusk was shortlisted in 2019. Other competitors against The Curse Rabbit include five works such as Polish author Olga Tokarczuk's Books of Jacob, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018. This year's winner will be announced on the 26th of next month, and the prize money of ?50,000 (approximately 80 million KRW) will be split evenly between the original author and the translator.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.