Min Jin Lee

Biography

Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul in 1968 and moved to Queens, New York at age seven. She studied history at Yale and law at Georgetown, worked briefly as a lawyer, and spent years researching the Korean-Japanese community — first after meeting a Korean-Japanese man at a party in New York in the 1990s and being told the community's history, then during four years living in Tokyo with her husband. The novel took her thirty years from first conception to publication. An earlier version was a short story published in the 1990s. Pachinko (2017) was longlisted for the National Book Award, became an Apple TV+ series, and was named one of the best novels of the 2010s by multiple publications.

Min Jin Lee at a glance