Chang-rae Lee Biography

Change-rae Lee was born on July 29, 1965, in Seoul, South Korea. In 1968, his father, Young Yong Lee, moved to the United States to continue the medical training he had begun in Korea. Lee, his mother, Inja, and his sister, Eunei, joined Young Yong in Pittsburgh six months later. After Young Yong secured a job at Bellevue Hospital, the family moved to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The family’s social circle centered around their Korean Presbyterian church in Flushing.

He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a New Hampshire prep school, before majoring in English at Yale University. After college, he worked for an investment firm but soon decided he wanted to pursue a writing career. His parents gave a reluctant blessing to this new career path. He received an MFA from the University of Oregon and went on to become an assistant professor of creative writing there. His first novel, Native Speaker, was published in 1995.

After publishing Native Speaker, Lee went on to write A Gesture Life (1999), Aloft (2004), the Pulitzer-Prize finalist The Surrendered (2010), and On Such a Full Sea (2014). He has won several awards, including the1995 Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award for Native Speaker; the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for The Surrendered; the 2015 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction for On Such a Full Sea, and the 2000 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for A Gesture Life. His writing has been published in periodicals such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Time. Since 2016 Lee has taught at Stanford as the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the English Department and Creative Writing Program.