Human Acts

A riveting, poetic and unrelentingly powerful work from the 2025 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

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. A controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense importance.