Human Acts won Korea's Manhae Prize for Literature and Italy's Premio Malaparte.
The narrator of the fifth chapter is Seon-ju, who suffered terrible sexual torture during the uprising and is working as an activist in the present day.
[3] Human Acts was serialized in the literary blog Window (창문) run by Changbi, a Korean publishing house, from November 2013 to January 2014.
[7] Referring to her experience while composing the novel, Han mentioned that she could sometimes write only three lines a day due to the emotional toll of the incident.
Although the novel describes an incident familiar to most Korean readers, critics pointed out that the book was able to maintain its pace and tension until the end largely thanks to the power of Han's writing.
[11] Writing in The Korea Times, scholar and cultural critic David Tizzard compares Han Kang to the poet Park Nohae and suggests that her work is a symbol of Korean democracy.
"[12] During the Park Geun-hye administration, Human Acts was excluded from inclusion into the Sejong Library project[13] for reasons of ideological bias (books featuring keywords such as the Gwangju Uprising, North Korea, Kaesong Industrial Complex, Karl Marx, etc.
were largely excluded from the same list), and Han Kang was placed on the blacklist of professionals in the culture and the arts [wikidata].
[14] Rather than discussing the heavy, somber ramifications of the Gwangju Uprising or using titillating language, Han Kang chose to portray the grief of the individual people in a concise, boiled-down style.
[17] Rather than reenacting the historical incident, the author chose to place the perspectives squarely on the people who endured the horrific accident and the trauma they have had to carry since.
This question is central to the novel[14] and leads to the understanding that survivors must discuss the incident, record it, and remember it to make sure the unfortunate event, where the victims were their own neighbors, our friends, and our family members, will not repeat itself.