Harlem’s Min Jin Lee, Award Winning Writer And Journalist

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.

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, 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.

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