LITERATURE + LECTURES

The 2008/2009 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series presents an evening with Ha Jin.

Ha Jin, who emigrated from China in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, won the National Book Award for his novel, Waiting, in 1999, at which time he had only been writing in English for 12 years.

He is now the author of seven works of fiction and three books of poetry. In his first novels, including Waiting and War Trash, winner of the PEN/Faulkner award, Jin looked back to his homeland, writing with what the Los Angeles Times Book Review called “an absorbed passion for minutiae characteristic of Dickens and Balzac.”

His new novel, A Free Life, follows the Wu family from Boston to Atlanta, where the main character experiences a kind of liberation.

Booklist, which calls the book “capacious, pointillistic, empathetic, and tender,” writes, “Ha Jin’s tale of one immigrant family’s odyssey in America affirms humankind’s essential mission, to honor life.”

The New Yorker says of Ha Jin, “Reading him is almost like falling in love: you experience anxiety, profound self-consciousness, and an uncomfortable sensitivity to the world—and somehow, it’s a pleasure.”

Ha Jin teaches at Brown University.

Presented in association with Asia Society Texas Center.