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South Korean writer becomes first woman to win Man Asian Literary Prize

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Ilona Lo Iacono
WVoN co-editor 

Kyung-sook Shin, of South Korea, has become the first woman, and the first Korean, to win the prestigious Man Asian Literary Prize.

Shin’s novel, Please Look After Mom (also published in English as Please Look After Mother), was announced as the winner of the US$30,000 prize at a ceremony in Hong Kong on March 15.

The prize is an annual literary award given to the best novel by an Asian writer, either written in English or translated into English, and published in the previous calendar year.

Chi-Young Kim, who translated the novel into English, also received a prize of US$5000.

Please Look After Mom has sold 1.93 million copies in South Korea alone, and has already been published in 19 countries. Following its literary prize success, this will be expanded to 32 countries.

This is the first of Shin’s works to be translated into English, although she has written numerous works of fiction and is one of South Korea’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists.

She has previously been awarded the Manhae Literature Prize, the Dong-in Literature Prize, and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, as well as France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu.

Chair of Man Asian Literary Prize Judges, BBC Special Correspondent Razia Iqbal, said that Please Look After Mom stood out from the shortlist of seven because it “worked as a complete novel” and was “compelling from start to finish”, with multiple layers of meaning, ensuring that the novel was “much richer” than on first reading.

The story, told from the perspectives of four family members, begins when a mother from rural Korea travels to Seoul to visit her children, and goes missing in the crowded Seoul Station subway.

“The journey to find the mother in the book is the journey to regain what we’ve lost in the progress of modernity,” Shin said.

Iqbal described Please Look After Mom as “an incredibly moving portrait of what it means to be a mother, but also of the tradition and modernity of the family in South Korea.”

In an interview for BBC Radio’s Weekend Strand, Shin said, through an interpreter, that she was really surprised to find out that she was the first woman to win the prize.

“I don’t feel like a man or woman, I feel like a writer,” she said. “Although, in my writing, there are a lot of women, a lot of female points of view.

“I think in some respects women are closer to literature, because they see things more sensitively perhaps, they feel things more intensely, and that fits in with what literature is, to get under the skin of things.”

She added that it was “strange” that she found it harder to write the narratives from the female perspectives than from the male.

“Perhaps if a male writer was writing this book about motherhood it would bring things that I might have missed… I want to read that book, the book about mother written by a man.”

Shin, who says that her own mother inspired the story, and is the energy behind her writing, has said that she wants the book to show that women were ” once girls and women as we are now”, not just “born to be mothers”.

Shin, born in 1963, put herself through night school in Seoul while working in an electronics plant, as her farmer parents could not afford to send her to high school.

She graduated from the Seoul Institute of the Arts with a creative writing major and made her literary debut in 1985 with a novella, Winter’s Fable.

The popularity of her work has been credited with helping to create a market for women’s writing in South Korea.

Please Look After Mom is also long-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

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