Authors Like Min Jin Lee

Thomas Mann

German · Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (1924)

Mann was born in Lübeck in 1875 and published Buddenbrooks, the story of a Lübeck merchant family’s decline over four generations, when he was 26. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, with the citation singling out Buddenbrooks. He left Germany after the Nazis came to power, became an American citizen in 1944 and died in Zurich in 1955.

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Amy Tan

American · The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991)

Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952 to parents who had emigrated from China. The Joy Luck Club braids the stories of four Chinese immigrant mothers who meet to play mah-jong in San Francisco with those of their American-born daughters; it became a bestseller and a 1993 film.

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Chang-rae Lee

Korean-American · Native Speaker (1995), A Gesture Life (1999)

Lee was born in South Korea in 1965 and moved to the United States at about three. Native Speaker, his first novel, follows Henry Park, a Korean American industrial spy assigned to watch a Korean American politician in New York; it won the PEN/Hemingway Award. The Surrendered (2010) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Yu Miri

Zainichi Korean, writes in Japanese · The End of August (2004), Tokyo Ueno Station (2014)

Yu was born in Tsuchiura, Japan, in 1968 to Korean parents and holds South Korean citizenship. She won the Akutagawa Prize in 1997, and Morgan Giles’s translation of Tokyo Ueno Station won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020. The End of August follows her grandfather, a marathon runner from colonial Korea who later ran a pachinko parlour in Japan. Her debut novel was blocked by a court order after a woman who recognised herself in it objected; a revised version appeared in 2002.

Han Kang

South Korean · The Vegetarian (2007), Human Acts (2014)

Han was born in Gwangju in 1970. Human Acts follows the dead and the survivors of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising; The Vegetarian, in Deborah Smith’s translation, won the International Booker Prize in 2016. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.

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Yaa Gyasi

Ghanaian-American · Homegoing (2016), Transcendent Kingdom (2020)

Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana, in 1989 and grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. Homegoing begins with two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana: Effia marries a British commander at Cape Coast Castle, while Esi is held in the castle’s dungeons and shipped into slavery. Each chapter then follows one of their descendants, down to the present day.

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Isabel Allende

Chilean-American · The House of the Spirits (1982), Paula (1994)

Allende was born in Lima in 1942 to Chilean parents and went into exile in Venezuela after the 1973 coup in Chile. The House of the Spirits, which began as a letter to her dying grandfather, follows the Trueba family across four generations up to a military coup modelled on Chile’s. She has lived in California since the late 1980s.

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Celeste Ng

American · Everything I Never Told You (2014), Little Fires Everywhere (2017)

Ng was born in Pittsburgh in 1980 to parents from Hong Kong. Everything I Never Told You opens with the death of Lydia Lee, the favourite child of a Chinese American father and a white mother in 1970s Ohio, and traces it back to the hopes her parents placed on her. Little Fires Everywhere became a television series in 2020.

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Jhumpa Lahiri

American, born in London · Interpreter of Maladies (1999), The Namesake (2003)

Lahiri was born in London in 1967 to Bengali parents and grew up in Rhode Island. Interpreter of Maladies, her first book, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000. The Namesake follows Gogol Ganguli, the son of Bengali immigrants in Massachusetts, from birth into his thirties. She later moved to Rome and began writing in Italian.

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Cathy Park Hong

Korean-American · Engine Empire (2012), Minor Feelings (2020)

Hong is a poet born in Los Angeles to Korean parents. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, a book of essays on race, shame and Asian American life, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.