Ha Jin

Ha Jin grew up in mainland China and came to the United States in 1985 to do graduate work at Brandeis University, from which he earned his PhD in 1993. In 1990 he began to write in English. To date, he has published four volumes of poetry, Between Silences (1990), Facing Shadows (1996), Wreckage (2001), and A Distant Center (2018), and four books of short fiction, Ocean of Words (1996), which received the PEN/Hemingway Award; Under the Red Flag (1997), which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and The Bridegroom (2000), which received the Asian American Literary Award and the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and A Good Fall (2009). He has also published eight novels: In the Pond (1998), Waiting (1999), which received the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Crazed (2002),  War Trash (2004), which received the PEN/Faulkner Award;  A Free Life (2007),  Nanjing Requiem (2011), A Map of Betrayal (2014), and The Boat Rocker (2016). His most recent book is The Banished Immortal: a Life of Li Bai (2019), a biography of the great 8th-century Chinese poet. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He taught poetry writing at Emory University for eight years. Since 2002 he had been a professor of English and creative writing at Boston University and lives outside of Boston.