Lee Min Jin

Min Jin Lee (born November 11, 1968) is a Korean American author and journalist based in Harlem, New York City. Her work frequently deals with Korean and Korean American topics. She is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires (2007) and Pachinko (2017).

Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her family came to the United States in 1976, when she was seven years old, and she grew up in Elmhurst, Queens, in New York City. Her parents owned a wholesale jewelry store on 30th Street and Broadway in Koreatown, Manhattan. As a new immigrant, she spent much time at the Queens Public Library, where she learned to read and write. She attended the Bronx High School of Science, and later studied history and was a resident of Trumbull College at Yale College in Connecticut. While at Yale she attended her first writing workshop, as part of a non-fiction writing class she had signed up for in her junior year. She also studied law at Georgetown University Law Center, later working as a corporate lawyer in New York from 1993 to 1995. She quit law due to the extreme working hours and her chronic liver disease, deciding to focus on her writing instead. She lived in Tokyo, Japan, for four years from 2007 to 2011.Lee resides in Harlem, Manhattan, with her son, Sam, and her husband, Christopher Duffy, who is half Japanese.