Min Jin Lee - 2024

Min Jin Lee is the author of novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko. She is a finalist for the National Book Award. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Chosun Ilbo, Vogue, and Food & Wine. Lee introduced the Penguin Classics edition of The Great Gatsby. In 2023, Lee served as the Editor of The Best American Shorts Stories. Lee received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  Lee was inducted into the Hall of Fame for the New York Foundation for the Arts and New York State Writers. She was honored by the Columbia University Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the Asian American Journalists Association, the Korean American Community Foundation, the Council of Korean Americans, and the Queens Public Library.  She is at work on her third novel, American Hagwon and a nonfiction work, Name Recognition. She is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College and serves as a trustee of PEN America and a director of the Authors Guild. Lee lives in Harlem with her family.

Ms. Lee’s appreciation of F. Scott’s work, The Great Gatsby is well known.  In the New York Review she wrote in 2021, “Nearly a hundred years after its publication, Gatsby is considered “the Greatest American Novel.” I cannot imagine a more persuasive and readable book about lost illusions, class, White Americans in the 1920s, and the perils and vanity of assimilation. It remains a modern novel by exploring the intersection of social hierarchy, White femininity, White male love, and unfettered capitalism. I’ve read and loved Gatsby for a very long time, and with each new reading, my understanding of it has grown more layered and provocative.”