Human Acts | Granta

  • Published: 07/01/2016
  • ISBN: 9781783781621
  • Granta Books
  • 224 pages

Human Acts

Han Kang

Translated by Deborah Smith

Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend’s corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma.

Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense importance.

£8.99

Hive Amazon Blackwells 

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 *****

The Author

Han Kang was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Gwangju, South Korea, she 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 is also the author of Human Acts (Portobello, 2016) and The White Book (Portobello, 2017). She is based in Seoul.

More about the author →

The Translator

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. Tilted Axis’ first titles includes a darkly erotic Bengali novella, an obliquely allegorical take on South Korea’s social minorities, and a feminist, environmentalist narrative poem from Indonesia, published as a ‘sight-impaired-accessible’ art book. These will be followed by translations from Thai, Uzbek, and Japanese.

More about the translator →

From the Same Author

Han Kang on Granta.com

Fiction | Granta 140

White | State of Mind

Han Kang

‘I was told that she was a girl, with a face as white as a crescent-moon rice cake.’

Fiction by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith.

In Conversation | Granta Books

Han Kang in Conversation

Han Kang & Max Porter

Han Kang visited the Granta offices to discuss her book Human Acts.

Fiction | Granta 133

The Fruit of My Woman

Han Kang

‘It was late May when I first saw the bruises on my wife’s body.’

Fiction by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith.

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