World Literature Reading Group

The World Literature Reading Group aims to showcase literature written outside of the anglophone world. On our journey we will make a variety of stops in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Latin America, tracking down the masterpieces that might have otherwise been overlooked. In this opening group, we begin in South Korea to discuss Han Kang’s Human Acts.

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.

“Like the novels of [Primo] Levi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Han’s book testifies to a specific atrocity while raising universal questions about what it means to be human, with all the potential for tenderness and cruelty that this entails.” Times Literary Supplement

“An important novel, moving and heartbreaking in its dignity.” Irish Times