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).

Background

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 there. As a new immigrant, she spent much time at the Queens Public Library, where she learned to read and write. She attended the Bronx High School of Science, and later studied history and was a resident of Trumbull College 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. She lived in Tokyo, Japan, for four years from 2007 to 2011. Lee 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.

Lee served three consecutive seasons as an English-language columnist of South Korea's newspaper ''Chosun Ilbos "Morning Forum" feature.

She has also lectured about writing, literature, and politics at Columbia University, Amherst College, Tufts, Loyola Marymount University, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins (SAIS), University of Connecticut, Boston College, Hamilton College, Harvard Law School, Yale University, Ewha University, Waseda University, 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 currently the writer-in-residence at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

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 fro
''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. It is the first novel written for an adult, English-speaking audience about Korean Japanese culture. 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
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