Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea and immigrated to Queens, New York with her family in 1976 when she was seven years old. Lee is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and was inducted into the Bronx Science Hall of Fame. At Yale College, she majored in History and was awarded the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction. She attended law school at Georgetown University and worked as a lawyer for several years in New York prior to writing full time. From 2007 to 2011, Lee lived in Tokyo where she researched and wrote Pachinko. As of the fall of 2019, she will be based in New York City, where she will be working on American Hagwon, the third diaspora novel of “The Koreans” trilogy and Name Recognition, a work of non-fiction. From 2019-2022, she will be a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College. She serves as a trustee of PEN America, as a director of the Authors Guild and on the National Advisory Board of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard.