A riveting, poetic and unrelentingly powerful work from the author of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize-winning novel The Vegetarian
HAN KANG was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, was published by Portobello Books in 2015 and won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.DEBORAH SMITH's translations from the Korean include two novels by Han Kang, The Vegetarian and Human Acts, and two by Bae Suah, A Greater Music and Recitation. In 2015 Deborah completed a PhD at SOAS on contemporary Korean literature and founded Tilted Axis Press. In 2016 she won the Arts Foundation Award for Literary Translation. She tweets as @londonkoreanist.
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
*Snake Ropes*
An important and necessary book... a devastating and vital a work
of literature
*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
*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
*Guardian*
Han Kang's Human Acts is piercing: an exquisite, painful and deeply
courageous account of the 1980 Gwangju massacre
*Guardian*
Powerful and disturbing... lyrical and chilling
*Mail on Sunday*
Powerful
*Shiny New Books blog*
[Han Kang's] way of telling about the events of a 10-day insurgency
in 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
*Guardian*
Han Kang's Human Acts is no less piercing: an exquisite, painful
and deeply courageous account of the 1980 Gwangju massacre
*Guardian*
An extraordinary novel about politics and torture, about the way we
memorialize past wrongs. Deborah Smith's translation is typically
lucid and readable
*Observer*
Beautiful and brutal... A fearless examination of the state of
humanity and the diagnosis isn't good. This is the pitiless kind of
novel that burrows into its reader
*Irish Times*
Though there's violence and bloodshed on a large scale in Han's
depiction of the Gwangju Uprising, it is the small human movements
that I found most vivid. That contrast helped to create the
strongest experience of all the books I read this year
*David's Book World*
Raw and beautiful, Han's prose was as contrary as the human acts
she described
*New Internationalist*
[Human Acts] unblinkingly explores the aftermath of one of the
darkest moments in South Korean history... It's written with a
clear-eyed exactness that is at times horrifying... Ultimately,
this is a harrowing novel that deftly examines human cruelty
*Independent*
[A] remarkable novel... A technical and emotional triumph
*Daily Telegraph*
Han Kang's Human Acts, translated by Deborah Smith, gutted me. The
language finds ways to dig in and hold you even as you want to turn
from the horror depicted
*Guardian*
Brilliant... Incredibly moving
*Lisa McInerney*
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