Min Jin Lee

Background

Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea. Lee's family came to the United States in 1976, when she was seven years old. She grew up in Elmhurst, Queens, New York. Her parents owned a wholesale jewelry store there. She studied history at Yale College and law at Georgetown University Law Center. She also worked as a corporate lawyer in New York for several years before becoming a writer. She lived in Japan for four years from 2007 to 2011. Lee lives in New York with her son, Sam, and her husband, Christopher Duffy, who is half-Japanese.

Lee also served three consecutive seasons as a "Morning Forum" English-language columnist of South Korea's newspaper Chosun Ilbo.

She has also lectured about writing, literature, and politics at Columbia, Tufts, Loyola Marymount University, Stanford, 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.

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 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, The Times of London, NPR's Fresh Air, USA Today, a notable novel by the San Francisco Chronicle, a New York Times Editor's Choice, was a selection for the Wall Street Journal Juggler Book Club, and a No. 1 Book Sense pick. The novel was also published in the U.K. by Random House in 2007, 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.

In 2017, a 10th Anniversary edition of the novel was released by Apollo.

Pachinko

In 2017 Lee released a novel entitled Pachinko, which is an epic historical novel following characters from Korea that eventually migrate to Japan. Its release date was February 7, 2017, from Grand Central Publishing. The book has received strong reviews from The Guardian, NPR, The New York Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Irish Times, Kirkus Reviews and many more sources, and is also on the "Best Fiction of 2017" lists from Esquire, Amazon.com, Entertainment Weekly, the BBC, The Guardian, Book Riot and more. Author Roxane Gay also said it was her favorite book of 2017 in The Washington Post.

Non-Fiction

Lee has also published non-fiction in periodicals such as the Times of London, the New York Times Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, Vogue, Travel + Leisure, the Wall Street Journal and Food & Wine.

Reviews

Lee has written a number of reviews. She most recently 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.

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).

Her other essays 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.

Accolades

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.

While at Yale, she was awarded both the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction.