Min Jin Lee

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.

Min Jin Lee (born November 11, 1968) is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires (2007) and Pachinko (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award, and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

She is a Korean American author and journalist based in Harlem, New York City; her work frequently deals with the Korean diaspora.

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.

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.

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.

Lee's short story "Axis of Happiness" won the 2004 Narrative Prize from Narrative Magazine.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

In a Washington Post interview, writer Roxane Gay called Pachinko her favorite book of 2017.

Pachinko was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.

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.

Lee is the cousin of actress Kim Hye-eun, who starred in the drama Twenty-Five Twenty-One.

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+.

The series, consisting of eight episodes, premiered in March 2022.

As of 2023, Pachinko has been published in over 35 languages.

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.

Free Food for Millionaires:

President Barack Obama recommended Pachinko in May 2019, writing that Lee's novel is "a powerful story about resilience and compassion."