Chang-rae Lee (born July 29, 1965) is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing.

Early life

Lee was born in South Korea in 1965 to Young Yong and Inja Hong Lee. He immigrated to the United States with his family when he was 3 years old to join his father, who was then a psychiatric resident and later established a successful practice in Westchester County, New York. In a 1999 interview with Ferdinand M. De Leon, Lee described his childhood as "a standard suburban American upbringing," in which he attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, before earning a B.A. in English at Yale University in 1987. For this book, Lee received the Asian American Literary Award. 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. It received the 2006 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in the Adult Fiction category. His 2010 novel The Surrendered won the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a nominated finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lee's next 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. It was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 2016, Lee joined the faculty of Stanford University, where he is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English. He previously taught creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. He was also a Shinhan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

Major themes

Lee explores issues central to the Asian-American experience: the legacy of the past; the encounter of diverse cultures; the challenges of racism and discrimination, and exclusion; dreams achieved and dreams deferred. In the process of developing and defining itself, then, Asian-American literature speaks to the very heart of what it means to be American. The authors of this literature above all concern themselves with identity, with the question of becoming and being American, of being accepted, not "foreign." Lee's writings have addressed these questions of identity, exile and diaspora, assimilation, and alienation.

{| class="wikitable sortable mw-collapsible"

|+Awards for Lee's writing

!Year

!Title

!Award

!Category

!Result

!

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!1995

| rowspan="2" |Native Speaker

|Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award

|—

|

|

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!1996

|PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel

|—

|

|

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! rowspan="2" |2000

| rowspan="2" |

|Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

|Fiction

|

|

|-

|NAIBA Book of the Year Award

|—

|

|

|-

!2006

|Aloft

|Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature

|Fiction

|

|

|-

! rowspan="2" |2011

| rowspan="2" |

|Dayton Literary Peace Prize

|—

|

|

|-

|Pulitzer Prize

|Fiction

|

|

|-

!2017

|—

|John Dos Passos Prize for Literature

|—

|

|

|}

Bibliography

Books

  • Native Speaker (Riverhead, 1994)
  • A Gesture Life (Riverhead, 1999)
  • Aloft (Riverhead, 2004)
  • The Surrendered (Riverhead, 2010)
  • On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead, 2014)
  • My Year Abroad (2021)

Articles

Screenplays

  • Coming Home Again (co-written and directed by Wayne Wang, 2019)
  • Gold Mountain (TBA)

Critical studies and reviews of Lee's work

;My year abroad

———————

;Bibliography notes

References

  • "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
  • [http://ccragg123.libsyn.com/-the-surrendered-author-chang-rae-lee-] KGNU Claudia Cragg radio interview with Chang-Rae Lee, March 2011, on 'The Surrendered'.