In 2019, Lee became a writer-in-residence at Amherst College in Massachusetts.[2][3]
Early life and education
Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea.[4] 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.[1][5] 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.[6]
From 2007 to 2011, Lee lived in Tokyo, Japan.[10] Since 2012, she has resided in Harlem.[9] 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.[11][12]
Lee's short story "Axis of Happiness" won the 2004 Narrative Prize from Narrative Magazine.[15]
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.[16] A slightly modified version of the story appears in her 2017 novel Pachinko.[17]
A 10th Anniversary edition of the novel was released by Apollo in 2017.[27] 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.[20][19]
In a Washington Post interview, writer Roxane Gay called Pachinko her favorite book of 2017.[41] President Barack Obama recommended Pachinko in May 2019, writing that Lee's novel is "a powerful story about resilience and compassion."[42]
Pachinko was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.[43] 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+.[44]The series, consisting of eight episodes, premiered in March 2022.[45]
As of 2023, Pachinko has been published in over 35 languages.[46]
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.[47]
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.[65]
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.[68]
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.[70] 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.[71] 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.[72] She also wrote an article profiling the cuisine and work of Tokyo chef Seiji Yamamoto in Food & Wine.[73] She has also written a piece for the Barnes & Noble review entitled Sex, Debt, and Revenge: Balzac’s Cousin Bette.[74]
Her interviews and essays have also been profiled in online periodicals such as Chekhov's Mistress ("My Other Village: Middlemarch by George Eliot"),[75]Moleskinerie ("Pay Yourself First"),[76] and ABC News ("Biblical Illiteracy or Reading the Bestseller").[77]
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.[78][79]
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.[80] Her talk was titled Are Koreans Human?, which touched on writing her new novel and writing about the Korean diaspora.[81]
In September 2019, Lee gave Amherst College's annual DeMott lecture, a welcome address for incoming students.[82] 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."[83]
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
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
Bibliography
Short stories
The Best Girls (2004/2019) – Originally published in 2004, was re-issued in 2019 as a part of Amazon's Disorder Series
While at Yale, she was awarded the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction.[87]
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.[88]
In 2017, Lee was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction for her novel Pachinko.[43] That book was runner-up in the 2018 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Fiction.[89]
Lee is the 2024 recipient of the Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence, awarded by the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum to honor authors who continue the American storytelling tradition with the craft, wit, and social insight embodied by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
^Amherst (September 2023). "Faculty & Staff". Archived from the original on September 14, 2023. Retrieved September 13, 2023.
^ ab"Min Jin Lee". Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Archived from the original on April 9, 2021. Retrieved March 31, 2021.
^Jang, Jin-ri (April 6, 2022). "'파친코' 원작 이민진 작가, 놀라운 가족 관계…"'2521' 김혜은=내 사촌" [Writer Lee Min-jin, the original author of 'Pachinko', has an amazing family relationship... "'2521' Kim Hye-eun = My cousin] (in Korean). SpoTV News. Archived from the original on April 8, 2023. Retrieved April 6, 2022 – via Naver.
^Katsoulis, Melissa (July 28, 2007). "Free Food for Millionaires". The Times. Archived from the original on September 17, 2023. Retrieved September 14, 2023.
^McClurg, Jocelyn (April 2007). "Archived copy". USA Today. Archived from the original on September 17, 2023. Retrieved September 14, 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
^NYT Book Review (November 30, 2017). "The 10 Best Books of 2017". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 30, 2017. Retrieved February 9, 2018.