Ha Jin (Boston/USA)

Host: Lothar Müller (literary editor, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Berlin)

Ha Jin was born in the northern Chinese city of Jinzhou in 1956. He emigrated to the USA in 1985, where he since has received the PEN/Faulkner Award twice.

Until the autumn of 2001, Ha Jin taught English literature at Emory University. Since 2002 he has held the position of professor at Boston University. His first novels and stories are set in China between the Cultural Revolution and the present. His novella "In the Pond" (1998) is a scathing satire on society, whereas his novels "Waiting" (1999) and "The Crazed" (2002) tell a story of human weaknesses in a straitjacket of social dogmas. For his novel "Waiting", Ha Jin was presented both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award) he was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.In his novel "War Trash" (2004, the second of his works to receive the PEN/Faulkner Award, Ha Jin thematises China’s involvement in the Korean War in the early 1950s. He narrates the fate of a Chinese officer and an interpreter who are soon taken prisoner by the Americans and end up in a POW camp between the Chinese nationalist and communist fronts.

Publications in English include:

- Waiting (Vintage 2000)

- In the Pond (Vintage 2000)

- Ha, The Bridegroom ( Pantheon Books 2000)

- The Crazed (Vintage 2004)

- War Trash (Vintage 2005)