A New York Times bestseller, Pachinko was also a Top 10 Books of the Year for BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the New York Public Library, and on over 75 best books of the year lists, including NPR, PBS, and CNN. Her novel Pachinko was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017. He allowed his monitors to have lunch in the classroom, and I don’t know if he knew this, but he rescued me from the terror of a middle school lunchroom and from the reality that I did not know how to act around children my own age.Min Jin Lee is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Richard Sosis, who taught law, and he selected me as a classroom monitor. At Junior High School 73 in Maspeth, New York, I had a wonderful teacher and his name was Mr. Then, later, my parents had a tiny wholesale jewelry store in Manhattan that sold costume jewelry to street peddlers and gift shops. Now, in the first year in America my father ran a newspaper stand in the lobby of a very dingy office building. I made my way through school and through shelves and shelves of borrowed books from the Elmhurst Public Library. I did my work, and I looked forward to be with my sisters, who protected me. The years that followed were not very different.

I thought I would share that with you today.

Recently, I was asked by the New York Times to write about “What is Power?” I thought about the thing that I wanted more than anything as a child, as a young person, throughout my life, and I thought I would write about not what is power but why I wanted this power. I wanted to give this talk because for those of you who don’t know, I’ve always had a serious issue talking. Min Jin Lee at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference The speech is based on the New York Times essay Lee wrote, “ Breaking My Own Silence.” Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.īelow are edited recordings of writer Min Jin Lee speaking in 2019 about the struggle she found in finding her own voice, first as a profoundly shy Korean girl growing up in America and eventually as the exceptional novelist she became. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens.

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.

Min jin