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.