Human Acts by Han Kang

Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. Amid a violent student uprising a young boy named Dong-ho is killed.

As his friend searches for Dong-ho's corpse, we also meet an editor struggling against censorship, a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories, and Dong-ho's grief-stricken mother. Through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope comes a tale of a brutalised people in search of a voice. A modern classic, Human Acts has been both a controversial bestseller and an award-winning book in Korea, and it confirmed Han Kang as a writer of international importance.

MEDIA REVIEWS

Human Acts is a stunning piece of work. The language is poetic, immediate, and brutal. Han Kang has again proved herself to be a deft artist of storytelling and imagery - Jess Richards, author, Snake Ropes

An important and necessary book... a devastating and vital a work of literature - Lucy Scholes, National

A conversation of which we rarely hear both sides: the living talking to the dead, and the dead speaking back - Sunday Telegraph

This ghostly narrative is elliptical and self-conscious about the difficulty of accounting for the legacy of state violence... poignant - Anthony Cummins, Observer

[Han Kang's] way of telling about the event of a 10-day insurgency on Gwangju, South Korea in 1980 and its psychological, spiritual and political aftermath opened my eyes to the cruelty and viciousness perpetrated on the youth of that city. Her writing is spare and yet clotted with emotion - Susie Orbach, Best Books of 2016, Guardian

Han Kang's Human Acts is piercing: an exquisite, painful and deeply courageous account of the 1980 Gwangju massacre - Philippe Sands, Best Books of 2016, Guardian

Powerful and disturbing... lyrical and chilling - Mail on Sunday

About Han Kang

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. In 1993 she made her literary debut as a poet and published her first short story in 1994. She won the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian and was shortlisted for The White Book. In 2024, Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’.

Among other major awards and prizes she is the winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger 2023 for the French edition of We Do Not Part. She taught in the department of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts for eleven years before leaving in 2018 to focus on writing. She is the fifth writer to contribute to the ongoing Future Library project in Oslo, Norway.