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Han Kang is a disquieting storyteller who leads the reader into the very heart of human experience, where the singular crosses the universal Author of ten books of fiction and poetry in her native Korean, Han’s subversive work has been brought onto the Anglophone stage through close partnership with her award-winning translator Deborah Smith Smith’s elegant renditions of the novels Human Acts (2016) and The Vegetarian (2015) form part of a recent blossoming of international interest in Korean literature; Dalkey Archive’s Library of Korean Literature launched in 2013 and consists of 25 translations so far Originally published as three novellas in South Korea nearly a decade ago, Han has said that The Vegetarian was initially received as ‘very extreme and bizarre’ in Korea It has since become a cult bestseller, with translation rights sold in twenty countries and its central novella ‘Mongolian Mark’ awarded the prestigious Yi Sang Literary Prize in 2005 Human Acts, her latest novel, was awarded the Korean Manhae Literary Prize last year, adding to her numerous other accolades   ‘I believe that humans should be plants’ This line from the great modernist poet Yi Sang, written in the Korean script hangul banned under Japanese rule, reportedly obsessed Han during university and became the seed for The Vegetarian Yi’s dream-like images evoking the violence of imperialism upon the colonial subject are mirrored in Han’s surrealistic and painterly portrayal of a woman’s personal rebellion The novel tells the story of Yeong-hye who, haunted by grotesque dreams, first gives up meat, then food altogether in a radical refusal of human cruelty and destruction In a patriarchal society where vegetarianism is rare, Yeong-hye’s transgression eventually leads to her institutionalisation and force-feeding Han’s life-long exploration of the themes of violence and humanity are here rooted in the anorexic body forming a provocative psychological portrait of a woman’s body politics   Human Acts revisits these themes but pans out to the national stage, excavating the traumatic legacy of the Gwangju massacre in post-war Korean history Opening in the Gwangju Commune, the action unfurls in the crucible of the 1980s student and worker-led democratic movement In 1979 when military dictator Park Chung-Hee, the father