# Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee (Korean: 이민진; born November 11, 1968) is a Korean American author and journalist based in Harlem, New York City; her work frequently deals with the Korean diaspora. She is best known for writing Free Food for Millionaires (2007) and Pachinko (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award, and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2024, the New York Times asked 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers to vote for 100 Best Books of the 21st Century and Lee's book Pachinko was number 15 on the list. Pachinko was number 5 on the Reader's Version of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum awarded the 2024 Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence to Min Jin Lee, recognizing her for continuing the American storytelling tradition with the craft, wit, and social insight exemplified by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In 2019, Lee became a writer-in-residence at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

## Early life and education

Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her family immigrated to the United States in 1976, when she was seven years old. She was raised in Elmhurst, Queens, in New York City. Her parents owned a wholesale jewelry store on 30th Street and Broadway in Koreatown, Manhattan. As a new immigrant, she spent much time at the Queens Public Library, where she learned to read and write.
After attending the Bronx High School of Science, Lee studied history and was a resident of Trumbull at Yale College in Connecticut. While at Yale she attended her first writing workshop, as part of a non-fiction writing class she had signed up for in her junior year. She studied law at Georgetown University Law Center, later working as a corporate lawyer in New York from 1993 to 1995. She quit law due to the extreme working hours and her chronic liver disease, deciding to focus on her writing instead. She has since recovered from liver disease.

## Personal life

From 2007 to 2011, Lee lived in Tokyo, Japan. Since 2012, she has resided in Harlem. She is married to Christopher Duffy, with whom she has a son. Duffy is of European and Japanese descent; his great-great grandfather is Kabayama Sukenori.
Lee is a cousin of actress Kim Hye-eun.
In 2018, Lee stated that the works that most influence her as a writer are Middlemarch by George Eliot, Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac, and the Bible.

## Fiction
### Short fiction

Lee's short story "Axis of Happiness" won the 2004 Narrative Prize from Narrative Magazine.
Another short story by Lee, "Motherland", about a family of Koreans in Japan, was published in The Missouri Review in 2002 and won the Peden Prize for Best Short Story. A slightly modified version of the story appears in her 2017 novel Pachinko.
Lee's short stories have also been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts.

### Free Food for Millionaires

Her debut novel Free Food for Millionaires was published in 2007. It was named one of the Top 10 Novels of the Year by The Times of London, NPR's Fresh Air, and USA Today; a notable novel by the San Francisco Chronicle; and a New York Times Editor's Choice. It was a selection for the Wall Street Journal Juggler Book Club, and a No. 1 Book Sense pick. The novel was published in the U.K. by Random House in 2007, in Italy by Einaudi and in South Korea by Image Box Publishing. The book has also been featured on online periodicals such as the Page 99 test and Largehearted Boy.
A 10th Anniversary edition of the novel was released by Apollo in 2017. It was announced in January 2021 that Lee and screenwriter Alan Yang had teamed up to bring Free Food for Millionaires to Netflix as a TV series.

### Pachinko

In 2017 Lee released Pachinko, an epic historical novel following characters from Korea who eventually migrate to Japan. The book received strong reviews including those from The Guardian, NPR, The New York Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Irish Times, and Kirkus Reviews and is on the "Best Fiction of 2017" lists from Esquire, the Chicago Review of Books, Amazon.com, Entertainment Weekly, the BBC, The Guardian, and Book Riot. The book was named by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2017.
In a Washington Post interview, writer Roxane Gay called Pachinko her favorite book of 2017. President Barack Obama recommended Pachinko in May 2019, writing that Lee's novel is "a powerful story about resilience and compassion."
Pachinko was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. In August 2018, it was announced that Apple Inc. had obtained the screen rights to the novel for development as a television series for Apple TV+. The series, consisting of eight episodes, premiered in March 2022.
As of 2023, Pachinko has been published in over 35 languages.

### The Best American Short Stories

In 2023, Lee was chosen as the guest editor for The Best American Short Stories, an anthology of the best 20 short stories in fiction published the previous year.

### Top Ten "Book of the Year" Lists

Free Food for Millionaires:
* The Times
* NPR’s Fresh Air
* USA Today
Pachinko:
* The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017
* Book of the Year for BBC
* New York Public Library
* "Now Read This," the joint book club of PBS NewsHour and The New York Times
* CNN
* NPR
* Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
* USA Today

## Non-fiction

Lee has published non-fiction in periodicals such as The New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Times of London, Condé Nast Traveler, Vogue, Travel + Leisure, and Food & Wine.
For three consecutive seasons, Lee was an English-language columnist of South Korea's newspaper Chosun Ilbo's "Morning Forum" feature.

### Reviews

Lee has written a number of reviews. In 2012 she wrote a review of Toni Morrison's Home in The Times of London, and also a review in The Times of March Was Made of Yarn, edited by David Karashima and Elmer Luke, a collection of essays, stories, poems and manga made by Japanese artists and citizens in the wake of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. She also wrote The Times reviews of Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies and Jodi Picoult's Wonder Woman: Love and Murder. In 2018, Lee wrote a The New York Review of Books for Hang Kang's Human Acts, the essay is titled Korean Souls.

### Interviews

In her interview with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lee said part of her intention with her writing is to create a sense of directed thinking out of chaos and develop some form of a unified order.
In March 2023, the Association of Writers & Writing Program (AWP) invited Lee as the 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair Keynote Speaker. The Writer’s Chronicle published Lee’s fire chat conversation with librarian Nancy Pearl in Volume 56, September 2023.
PBS released an Arts Talk conversation between Lee and Ann Curry in July 2023, where they discussed Lee’s artistic process, religion, and tenacity in the fight against anti-Asian racism.
Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) released a documentary in August 2023 on Lee that covered biographical details and the inspiration for Pachinko.

### Essays

Her essays include "Will", anthologized in Breeder – Real Life Stories from the New Generation of Mothers (Seal Press Books, 2001) and "Pushing Away the Plate" in To Be Real (edited by Rebecca Walker) (Doubleday, 1995). Lee also published a piece in the New York Times Magazine entitled "Low Tide", about her observations of the survivors of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. She wrote another essay entitled Up Front: After the Earthquake in Vogue, reflecting upon her experiences living in Japan with her family after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. Lee has also written two other essays in Vogue, including Weighing In (2008) and Crowning Glory (2007).
An essay entitled "Reading the World" that Lee wrote appears in the March 26, 2010, issue of Travel + Leisure. She also wrote an article profiling the cuisine and work of Tokyo chef Seiji Yamamoto in Food & Wine. She has also written a piece for the Barnes & Noble review entitled Sex, Debt, and Revenge: Balzac’s Cousin Bette.
Her interviews and essays have also been profiled in online periodicals such as Chekhov's Mistress ("My Other Village: Middlemarch by George Eliot"), Moleskinerie ("Pay Yourself First"), and ABC News ("Biblical Illiteracy or Reading the Bestseller").
Other essays by Lee have been anthologized in The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works, Why I'm a Democrat (Ed. Susan Mulcahy), One Big Happy Family, Sugar in My Bowl and Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time.

### Lectures

Lee has lectured and spoken about writing, literature, and politics at numerous institutions.
When Lee was a Fiction Fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she gave the 2018–2019 Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in the Arts and Humanities. Her talk was titled Are Koreans Human?, which touched on writing her new novel and writing about the Korean diaspora.
In September 2019, Lee gave Amherst College's annual DeMott lecture, a welcome address for incoming students. The DeMott Lecture seeks "to expose incoming students to an engagement with the world marked by originality of thought coupled with direct social action, and to inspire intellectual participation in issues of social and economic inequality, racial and gender bias, and political activism."
Lee has also spoken across the world at different college and university campuses such as:
* University of Cambridge, May 2024
* The University of Utah, Tanner Humanities Center, March 2024
* Wachholz College Center, March 2024
* Hudson Valley Community College, April 2023
* Bergen Community College, March 2023
* Tulane University Zale-Kimmering, March 2023
* Seoul National University, November 2022
* Sejong University, August 2022
* University of Tampa, May 2022
* Yale University, Schwarzman Center, April 2022
* Duke University, Kenan Institute for Ethics, April 2022
* Harvard University, Radcliffe Institute, March 2022
* Ursinus College, May 2021
* Williams College, May 2021
* Boston College, February 2021
* Lenoir-Rhyne University, March 2020
* Amherst College, September 2019
* Denison University, March 2019
* Barnard College, Columbia University for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, March 2019
* American University, February 2019
* Boston University, January 2019
* Yale University, November 2018
* MIT, Starr Forum Series, October 2018
* Georgetown University Law Center, October 2018
* University of California-Irvine, October 2018
* Monmouth College, May 2018
* Harvard University, Mahindra Humanities Center, April 2018
* NYU, April 2018
* Johns Hopkins University, April 2018
* University of Michigan, April 2018
* Patrick Henry College, March 2018
* University of Arizona, March 2018
* Stanford University, February 2017