Her literary debut was in 1956 with two of her short stories ("The Season in Starlight" and "Precipice of a Myth") that were published in the Contemporary Literature Journal at the suggestion of Kim Dong-ni.
With vivid imagery, inventive writing style and keen perception, Han Malsook captures the multifaceted interiority of alienated human beings, in particular, the psychology of contemporary women in the postwar setting.
Her major work, “A Precipice of Myth” (Sinhwaui danae, 1960), utilizes existentialist perspective to probe the damaged psychology of a woman whose denial of conventional ethics and the very idea of future allows her to lead a temporal existence defined solely by pursuit of pleasure and comfort.
A story that embodies the postwar atmosphere of self-abandonment and nihilistic approach to life, it won the author instant recognition and became the main subject of existentialist discussion in the latter half of 1950's.
[5] Han is known for works including Certain Death (Eotteon jugeum), An Old Woman and a Cat, The Rainy Season, Black Rose (Geomeun jangmi) and “A White Distance".