Human Acts

Name: Human Acts
SKU: 9781846275975
Availability: OutOfStock

By Han Kang & Deborah Smith

Rs. 2,390.00

3 X Rs. 796.67 with

or 3 X Rs. 796.67 with

3 x Rs. 796.67 with

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.

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SKU: 9781846275975 Categories: Historical Fiction, Literature & Fiction

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Review

“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

About the Author

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 is also the author of Human Acts (Portobello, 2016) and The White Book (Portobello, forthcoming 2017). She is based in Seoul.

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. 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.