Ha Jin

Ha Jin was born in 1956, in Jin County, Liaoning Province. At age 14, he served in the PLA, staying on the Sino-Soviet border in Hunchun, Jilin. Five years later he left the army and began to work in a railroad company in Jiamusi. In 1977 when the entrance exam was reinstated, he passed the exam and entered Heilongjiang University as an English major. After that, he went on to study American literature at Shandong University, where he got his MA in 1984. He left mainland China for America in 1985 to do graduate work at Brandeis University where he earned his PhD in English and American literature in 1993. Since the early 1990s, he has been writing in both English and Chinese. He is an author of more than twenty books. In English he has published nine novels, four short story collections, four volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and a biography of Li Bai. In the United States he has received a number of awards, such as the National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Asian American Literary Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Currently he teaches fiction writing and migrant literature at Boston University, where he is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor. He lives outside Boston with his family.