Renowned author and National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee, who will join the College as a writer-in-residence starting in the 2019-2020 academic year, was recently the subject of a profile in the Boston Globe.
The New York Times best-selling author of Pachinko (2017) moved from New York to Boston this fall to start a yearlong fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard. Lee is currently at work on American Hagwon, the final installment of her Korean diaspora trilogy, which began with Free Food for Millionaires (2007) and continued with Pachinko. The new novel is set in Boston.
She told the Globe that for each novel, she interviews “100 people, easily. Some are half-hour interviews, some are days long, where I follow people around,” she said. “So let’s say I’m writing a lawyer character — I’d take 10 people who do what she does, and cobble someone together.”
Her three-year appointment to Amherst’s English department came about after her appearance at the College’s LitFest in March 2018.