Min Jin Lee

She has also lectured about writing, literature, and politics at Columbia, Amherst College, 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. She is currently the writer-in-residence at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

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.

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.

A 10th Anniversary edition of the novel was released by Apollo in 2017.

In 2017 Lee released a novel entitled Pachinko, which is an epic historical novel following characters from Korea who eventually migrate to Japan. It is the first novel written for an adult, English-speaking audience about Japanese Korean culture. 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, Chicago Review of Books, Amazon.com, Entertainment Weekly, the BBC, The Guardian, and Book Riot. In a Washington Post interview, writer Roxane Gay called Pachinko her favorite book of 2017. The book was named by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2017.

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

In 2017, Lee was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction for her novel Pachinko. That book was runner-up in the 2018 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Fiction.

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).

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.

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 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 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.

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

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, New York. Her parents owned a wholesale jewelry store there. As a new immigrant, she spent much time at the Queens Public Library, where she learned to read and write. She attended the Bronx High School of Science, and later studied history at Yale College in Trumbull College and law at Georgetown University Law Center. She also worked as a corporate lawyer in New York from 1993 to 1995 before quitting to focus on her writing. She lived in Tokyo, Japan, for four years from 2007 to 2011. Lee resides in Harlem, New York, with her son, Sam, and her husband, Christopher Duffy, who is half Japanese.

Min Jin Lee (born 1968) is a Korean American writer whose work frequently deals with Korean American topics. She is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires (2007) and Pachinko (2017).