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.
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Early life [edit]
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]
Writing career [edit]
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 newest book, On Such a Full Sea, is forthcoming in January 2014 from Riverhead Books.
Selected works [edit]
- Native Speaker (Riverhead, 1995)
- A Gesture Life (Riverhead, 1999)
- Aloft (Riverhead, 2004)
- The Surrendered (Riverhead, 2010)[9]
- On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead, 2014)
References [edit]
- ^ a b Minzesheimer, Bob (March 16, 2010). "Chang-rae Lee's 'Surrendered': Unrelentingly sad yet lovely". USA Today. Retrieved 31 March 2011.
- ^ a b c 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
- ^ 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 [edit]
- "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
- [1] KGNU Claudia Cragg radio interview with Chang-Rae Lee, March 2011, on 'The Surrendered'.
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- 1965 births
- Living people
- 20th-century American novelists
- 21st-century American novelists
- American men novelists
- American writers of Korean descent
- Guggenheim Fellows
- Naturalized citizens of the United States
- People from Princeton, New Jersey
- People from Westchester County, New York
- Phillips Exeter Academy alumni
- Princeton University faculty
- South Korean emigrants to the United States
- University of Oregon alumni
- Writers from New Jersey
- Writers from New York
- Writers from Oregon
- Yale University alumni
- Rome Prize winners
