Chang-Rae Lee

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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.

Contents

[edit] 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]

[edit] Writing 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]

[edit] Selected works

[edit] References

[edit] 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
  • [1] KGNU Claudia Cragg radio interview with Chang-Rae Lee, March 2011, on 'The Surrendered'.
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