Author Bio
• Birth—July 29, 1965
• Where—Seoul, Korea
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., University of
Oregon (USA)
• Awards—PEN/Hemingway Award; Anisfield-Wolf Prize;
NAIBA Book Award
• Currently—lives in Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Chang-rae Lee landed on the literary scene in 1995 with Native Speaker, a detective story about much more than just another crime. Critics responded, and Lee's debut received a string of recognition, including a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Biography/Critical Appreciation. Everyone agreed that Chang-rae Lee was a writer to watch. Over the nearly two decades since then, he has published four more novels, all to wide acclaim.
Lee and his family emigrated from Seoul, South Korea to the United States in 1968. His family settled in Westchester, New York, and Lee eventually attended Yale and the University of Oregon, where he earned his M.F.A.
Lee's first novel, Native Speaker (1995), won numerous awards including the PEN/Hemingway Award. The novel centers around a Korean American industrial spy, explores themes of alienation and betrayal as felt or perpetrated by immigrants and first-generation citizens, and played out in local politics.
In 1999, he published his second novel, A Gesture Life. This elaborated on his themes of identity and assimilation through the narrative of an elderly Japanese-American doctor who remembers treating Korean comfort women during World War II. For this book, Lee received the Asian American Literary Award.
His 2004 novel Aloft received mixed notices from the critics and featured Lee's first protagonist who is not Asian American, but a disengaged and isolated Italian-American suburbanite forced to deal with his world. It received the 2006 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in the Adult Fiction category.
His 2010 novel The Surrendered won the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a nominated finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In 2014 Lee published On Such A Full Sea, a dystopian novel set in a future version of the American city of Baltimore, Maryland called B-Mor where the main character, Fan, is a Chinese-American laborer working as a diver in a fish farm.
Lee a writer and a teacher, as well as the director of the M.F.A. Program at Hunter College of City University in New York City. Those fortunate enough to be his students get to learn from the man who knows the stuff of human nature—that the aftereffect of any act is the core of every great story, and that even the most conventional characters can bear the weight of unconventional story lines. (Adapted from Barnes & Noble and Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/12/2014.)
Extras
(From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview):
• If I weren't a writer," Lee reveals in our interview, "I'd probably be working in the food and/or wine business, perhaps running a wine or coffee bar—or even an Asian noodle soup shop."
• When asked what book most influenced his life or career as a writer, here is his response:
"The Book" doesn't quite exist for me—there are too many that influenced me in incalculable ways.... These, in no particular order, are several of my many, many favorites:
Dubliners by James Joyce—Stories so luminous that one would be instantly blinded by their beauty were it not for the revelatory poignancy of their narratives.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac—This is a wild and inspiring book, and was especially so for someone like me, a middle-class suburban kid who was always taught to color within the lines.
Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike—One of the few novels I might consider calling "perfect" —it's all here, in a virtuosic and utterly unified presentation: voice, characterization, narrative sequencing, keen social commentary, metaphorical/pictorial wizardry. Updike at the height of his powers.
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron—A torrential display of Styron's prodigious imagination and lyricism.
The Names by Don DeLillo—A brilliant, complex, brooding inquiry into the uses—and essential position—of language. A "novel of ideas" that goes beyond rgumentation and ultimately soars with the force of poetry.
(Autho nterview from Barnes & Noble.)