Chang-Rae Lee
| Chang-rae Lee | |
|---|---|
| Born |
July 29, 1965 Korea |
| Occupation | novelist |
| Nationality | USA (naturalized) |
| Notable work(s) | Native Speaker; Aloft |
| Notable award(s) |
PEN/Hemingway Award Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Asian American Literary Awards |
| Chang-Rae Lee | |
| Hangul | 이창래 |
|---|---|
| Hanja | 李昌來 |
| Revised Romanization | I Chang-rae |
| McCune–Reischauer | Yi Ch'ang-rae |
Chang-rae Lee (born July 29, 1965) is a Korean American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Princeton University,[1] where he has served as the director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.
Early life
Lee was born in South Korea in 1965. He emigrated to the United States with his family when he was 3 years old.[2] Raised in Westchester, New York, Lee attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. He graduated from Yale University with a degree in English and from the University of Oregon with a MFA in writing.[3] He worked as a Wall Street financial analyst for a year before turning to writing full-time.[2]
Career
Lee's first novel, Native Speaker (1995), won numerous awards including the PEN/Hemingway Award.[1] 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.[2] 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.[4] For this book, Lee received the Asian American Literary Award.[5] 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.[6] It received the 2006 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in the Adult Fiction category.[7] His 2010 novel The Surrendered won the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a nominated finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[8] Lee's most recent novel, On Such A Full Sea (2014) is set in a dystopian 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.[9]
Selected works
- Native Speaker (Riverhead, 1995)
- A Gesture Life (Riverhead, 1999)
- Aloft (Riverhead, 2004)
- The Surrendered (Riverhead, 2010)[10]
- On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead, 2014)
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Minzesheimer, Bob (March 16, 2010). "Chang-rae Lee's 'Surrendered': Unrelentingly sad yet lovely". USA Today. Retrieved 31 March 2011.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Garner, Dwight (September 5, 1999). "Interview: Adopted Voice". The New York Times. Retrieved 31 March 2011.
- ↑ Nguyen, Stacy (March 10, 2010). "Chang-rae Lee: On being Korean American, a novelist, and his family". Northwest Asian Weekly. Retrieved 31 March 2011.
- ↑ Kakutani, Michiko (August 31, 1999). "'A Gesture Life': Fitting In Perfectly on the Outside, but Lost Within". The New York Times. Retrieved 31 March 2011.
- ↑ The Asian American Writers' Workshop - Awards
- ↑ Dean, Tamsin (June 21, 2004). "High and dry". The Telegraph. Retrieved 31 March 2011.
- ↑ APALA Past Award Winners
- ↑ The 2011 Pulitzer Prize Winners Fiction
- ↑ Leyshon, Cressida (January 7, 2014). "'The Chorus of "We": An Interview With Chang-rae Lee". The New Yorker. Retrieved 7 January 2014.
- ↑ Wood, James (15 March 2010). "A Critic at Large: Keeping it Real". The New Yorker 86 (4): 71–75. Retrieved 16 January 2011.
External links
- "Mute in an English-Only World", an essay by Lee in the anthology Dream Me Home Safely: Writers on Growing Up in America, at Google Books
- Interview with Lee at Words on a Wire
- KGNU Claudia Cragg radio interview with Chang-Rae Lee, March 2011, on 'The Surrendered'.
|