After attending the Bronx High School of Science, Lee studied history and was a resident of Trumbull at Yale College in Connecticut.[5] 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.[5] She also studied law at Georgetown University Law Center,[2] later working as a corporate lawyer in New York from 1993 to 1995.[3] She quit law due to the extreme working hours and her chronic liver disease, deciding to focus on her writing instead.[6][3] Lee has since recovered from her liver disease.
From 2007-2011, Lee lived in Tokyo, Japan.[7] She now resides in Harlem, Manhattan, with her son, Sam, and her husband, Christopher Duffy, who is half Japanese.[8]
For three consecutive seasons, Lee was an English-language columnist of South Korea's newspaper Chosun Ilbo's "Morning Forum" feature.[10]
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.[11] 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.[12]
Lee's short story "Axis of Happiness" won the 2004 Narrative Prize from Narrative Magazine.[14]
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.[15] A slightly modified version of the story appears in her 2017 novel Pachinko.[16]
A 10th Anniversary edition of the novel was released by Apollo in 2017.[26] 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.[19][18]
In a Washington Post interview, writer Roxane Gay called Pachinko her favorite book of 2017.[40] President Barack Obama recommended Pachinko in May 2019, writing that Lee's novel is "a powerful story about resilience and compassion."[41]
Pachinko was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.[42] 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+.[43]The series, consisting of eight episodes, premiered in March 2022.[44]
As of 2023, Pachinko has been published in over 35 languages.[45]
The Best American Short Stories
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.[46]
In her interview with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lee reveals that part of her intention with her writing is to create a sense of directed thinking out of chaos and develop some form of a unified order.
[63]
PBS released an Arts Talk conversation between Lee and Ann Curry in July 2023, where they discussed Lee’s artistic process, religion, and her tenacity in the fight against Asian hate.[66]
The Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) released a documentary in August 2023 on Lee that covered biographical details and the inspiration for Pachinko.[67]
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.[68] 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.[69] 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.[70] She also wrote an article profiling the cuisine and work of Tokyo chef Seiji Yamamoto in Food & Wine.[71] She has also written a piece for the Barnes & Noble review entitled Sex, Debt, and Revenge: Balzac’s Cousin Bette.[72]
Her interviews and essays have also been profiled in online periodicals such as Chekhov's Mistress ("My Other Village: Middlemarch by George Eliot"),[73]Moleskinerie ("Pay Yourself First"),[74] and ABC News ("Biblical Illiteracy or Reading the Bestseller").[75]
Other essays by Lee 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.
Lectures
When Lee was a Fiction Fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she gave the 2018–2019 Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in the Arts and Humanities.[76] Her talk was titled Are Koreans Human?, which touched on writing her new novel and writing about the Korean diaspora.[77]
In September 2019, Lee gave Amherst College's annual DeMott lecture, a welcome address for incoming students.[78] The DeMott Lecture seeks "to expose incoming students to an engagement with the world marked by originality of thought coupled with direct social action, and to inspire intellectual participation in issues of social and economic inequality, racial and gender bias, and political activism."[79]
Bibliography
Short stories
The Best Girls (2004/2019) – Originally published in 2004, was re-issued in 2019 as a part of Amazon's Disorder Series
While at Yale, she was awarded the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction.[83]
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.[84]
In 2017, Lee was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction for her novel Pachinko.[42] That book was runner-up in the 2018 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Fiction.[85]
^Jang, Jin-ri (April 6, 2022). "'파친코' 원작 이민진 작가, 놀라운 가족 관계…"'2521' 김혜은=내 사촌" [Writer Lee Min-jin, the original author of 'Pachinko', has an amazing family relationship... "'2521' Kim Hye-eun = My cousin] (in Korean). SpoTV News. Retrieved April 6, 2022 – via Naver.
