Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Krys Lee is the author of the short story collection Drifting House and the recent debut novel How I Became a North Korean, both published by Viking, Penguin Random House. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, the Honor Title in Adult Fiction Literature from the Asian/Pacific American Libraries Association, and finalist for Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the BBC International Story Prize. Her fiction, journalism, and literary translations have appeared in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, San Francisco Chronicle, Corriere della Sera, and The Guardian, among others. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Yonsei University, Underwood International College, in South Korea.
Krys Lee's website
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This page includes two interviews with Krys Lee; in the video below, she discusses the creation of her collection of stories, Drifting House, and in the written piece beneath, she explains how cultural identity (or lack thereof) influences her writing.
Krys Lee on the creation of Drifting House
Krys Lee talks about how she came to write in America, and discusses her collection of stories, Drifting House.
You are Korean and came to the US with your parents when you were young. You grew up in California and Washington State and England, but now you live in Seoul, South Korea. You are part of a new wave of reverse immigration in which second-generation Asians living overseas return to the country of their parents. Why did you go back to the country from which your parents fled? Do you consider your home to be the US or South Korea?
Originally I returned to Korea with the intention of studying the language for a year before returning to England, where I was living at the time. But it was also an instinctual return to a wound - to find out what had happened to our family, and to understand the relationship between the individual and the country, and the past and the present that is always haunting it, for so ...
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Drifting House
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