Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee. Photo: Hae Ran

National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of Pachinko

Some writers tell us where people come from. Min Jin Lee reveals what drives them forward, and what they sacrifice along the way.

Her long-awaited new novel, American Hagwon, is a sweeping, intimate epic about one family’s pursuit of success in a world where the rules keep changing. Moving from Seoul to Sydney to Southern California, Lee explores the extraordinary faith families place in education, and the ambition, sacrifice, love, and heartbreak that come with the promise of a better life.

The third novel in Lee’s Diaspora Quartet, American Hagwon turns the Korean hagwon, the intensely competitive world of private education, into something larger: a powerful lens on family, class, immigration, identity, and the universal hunger to give our children more than we had.

It is the latest achievement in an extraordinary literary career. Lee’s debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires, was named a Top 10 Book of the Year by The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. Then came Pachinko, the multigenerational epic that became a global phenomenon. A National Book Award finalist and one of The New York Times Book Review’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, it inspired the acclaimed Apple TV+ series.

Born in Seoul and raised in Queens, Lee studied history at Yale and law at Georgetown before leaving the legal profession to write. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College, and New York State Author Laureate for 2025–2027. Her fiction has been translated into more than 35 languages.

And she is far from finished. Lee is at work on Marshall Plan, the fourth novel in her Diaspora Quartet, and Name Recognition, a memoir about visibility and voice.

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