Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul to a father who was a Korean War refugee and college-educated businessman and a mother who was the daughter of a well-known minister. After immigrating to the United States at age 7, she grew up in Elmhurst, Queens. Lee’s parents ran a wholesale jewelry shop in Manhattan’s Koreatown, where she and her sisters sometimes helped out. Lee studied history at Yale, followed by law at Georgetown. After practicing law in New York for two years, she began studying and practicing writing while raising her son. She wrote many short stories and novel drafts about the Korean diaspora as early as 1996, but her first novel, Free Food for Millionaires, was published in 2007. That same year, her family relocated to Tokyo, allowing her to collect oral histories from dozens of Koreans living in Japan, and she finished writing the draft that would be published as Pachinko. Pachinko has received many accolades, including being a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Lee is currently working on her third diaspora novel, American Hagwon, and will be a writer-in-residence at Amherst College from 2019-2022.