Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the Century.” She serves as the New York State Author Laureate from 2025 through 2027. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. She has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

The National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic, American Hagwon, available September 2026. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children, Bo, DH, and Mido, find their lives upended. Desperately striving to regain their footing, they move first to Sydney and eventually to Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, adjust to a new life where their experience and education mean nothing, and they can only set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. An unforgettable new novel where the men and women struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year.

Lee lives in Harlem with her family.