Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee (born November 11, 1968) is a Korean American author and journalist based in Harlem, New York City. Her work frequently deals with Korean and Korean American topics. She is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires (2007) and Pachinko (2017). Lee serves as a trustee of PEN America and a director of the Authors Guild. She is currently writing her third book, American Hagwon, the concluding novel on the Korean Diaspora Trilogy, and her memoir, Name Recognition.
Biography
Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her family came to the United States in 1976, when she was seven years old, and she grew up 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 also 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. Lee has since recovered from her liver disease.
From 2007-2011, Lee lived in Tokyo, Japan. She now resides in Harlem, Manhattan, with her son, Sam, and her husband, Christopher Duffy, who is half Japanese.
In 2018, Lee said that the works that most influence her as a writer are Middlemarch by George Eliot, Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac, and the Bible.
For three consecutive seasons, Lee was an English-language columnist of South Korea's newspaper Chosun Ilbo'''s "Morning Forum" feature.
Lee has lectured about writing, literature, and politics at Amherst College, Boston College, Boston University, Center for Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, University of Connecticut, Ewha University, Hamilton College, Harvard Law School, Johns Hopkins University (SAIS), Loyola Marymount University, Center for International Studies at MIT, Stanford University, Tufts University, the Newcomb Institute at Tulane University, Waseda University, and Yale University, She has also spoken at the American School in Japan, World Women's Forum, the Tokyo American Center of the U.S. Embassy, and the Asia Society in New York, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. She is the writer-in-residence at Amherst College in Massachusetts, but is currently on a leave of absence for the 2023-24 academic year.
Personal life
Lee is the cousin of actress Kim Hye-eun, who starred in the drama Twenty-Five Twenty-One.
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" ListsFree 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 CorporationUSA 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.
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 London 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 Times of London reviews of Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies and Jodi Picoult's Wonder Woman: Love and Murder.
Interviews
In her interview with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lee reveals that 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 her tenacity in the fight against Asian hate.
The 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
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."
Bibliography
Short storiesThe Best Girls (2004/2019) – Originally published in 2004, was re-issued in 2019 as a part of Amazon's Disorder Series Axis of Happiness (2004) – 2004 Narrative Prize from Narrative Magazine Motherland (2002) – William Peden Prize for Best Short Story, The Missouri ReviewNovels
Free Food for Millionaires (2007), Grand Central Publishing, .Pachinko (2017), Grand Central Publishing,
EditorThe Best American Short Stories (2023), Mariner Books, .
Accolades
While at Yale, she was awarded the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction.
She received the NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Fellowship for Fiction, the Peden Prize from The Missouri Review for Best Story, and The Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writer.
In 2017, Lee was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction for her novel Pachinko. That book was runner-up in the 2018 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Fiction.
The Guggenheim Foundation and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University awarded Lee fellowships in Fiction in 2018. The Manhae Prize committee presented her in 2022 one of the highest honors in Korean literature, the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, for her work on Pachinko.Writing Awards and Professional Honors
Awards
AAJA's Inaugural Visibility Award, 2023
Carnegie Corporation of New York Great Immigrants, Honoree, 2023
Bronx Science Atom Award, 2023
New York State Writers Hall of Fame, Inductee, 2022
Council of Korean Americans (CKA) Voice & Leadership Award, 2022
Forbes 50 Over 50 List, Honoree, 2022
Korean American Community Foundation (KACF) SF Trailblazer, Honoree, 2022
Queens Public Library Gala, Honoree, 2022
New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame, Inductee, 2019
Korean American Community Foundation (KACF) NY, Honoree, 2019
Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Runner-Up, 2018
Medici Prize, 2018
American Library Association Notable Book, 2018
Frederick Douglas 200, Writer Award, 2018
Adweek Creative 100, Ten Writers and Editors Who Are Changing the National Conversation, 2018
National Book Award, Finalist, 2017
Bronx High School of Science, Alumni Hall of Fame, Inductee, 2017
Korean Community Center, New Jersey, Honoree, 2016
Awards from South Korea
Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity, 2022
Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, 2022
Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, 2022
Fellowships
Fiction Fellow, Guggenheim Foundation, 2018-2019
Fiction Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 2018-2019
Fiction Fellow, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Artist, 2000
Honorary Doctorates
Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, Ursinus College, 2021
Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, Monmouth College, 2018
See also
Koreans in New York City
Koreatown, Queens
Koreatown, Manhattan
New Yorkers in journalism
References
External links
Min Jin Lee: Official homepage
Author Min Jin Lee: 'Free Food For Millionaires' at NPR
On-Point Radio with Tom Ashbrook: Min Jin Lee (Broadcast)
Min Jin Lee's Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay for Free Food for Millionaires
Motherland (full text), from The Missouri ReviewPachinko - The struggle of destiny book review from Whatbooktoreadnext.com''
1968 births
South Korean emigrants to the United States
American writers of Korean descent
Living people
Yale College alumni
Georgetown University Law Center alumni
21st-century American novelists
American women novelists
American women short story writers
21st-century American women writers
21st-century American short story writers
People from Elmhurst, Queens