HA JIN
Ha Jin has published volumes of poetry, collections of short
stories, and novels. His short fiction in Ocean of Words: Army
Stories (1996) and Under the Red Flag (1997) won praise from
critics and two prestigious literary prizes, the PEN/Hemingway
and Flannery O'Connor Awards, while an even wider popular
acclaim followed the publication of his best-selling novel
Waiting (1999), which won the National Book Award.
Jin's spare prose style in narrating the lives of ordinary
individuals trapped in political and moral ambiguities has led
to comparisons with Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov. Indeed,
he explores a world as unfamiliar to most of his readers as
Tsarist Russia: the Maoist Chinese culture of his youth.
Much of Jin's work is set in Manchuria, the forbidding yet
strategically important northeastern region of China, and his
stories generally take place in the turbulent period from the
mid 1960s to the mid 1980s. His writing focuses on the human
cost of ideolo.....
Ha Jin has published volumes of poetry, collections of short
stories, and novels. His short fiction in Ocean of Words: Army
Stories (1996) and Under the Red Flag (1997) won praise from
critics and two prestigious literary prizes, the PEN/Hemingway
and Flannery O'Connor Awards, while an even wider popular
acclaim followed the publication of his best-selling novel
Waiting (1999), which won the National Book Award.
Jin's spare prose style in narrating the lives of ordinary
individuals trapped in political and moral ambiguities has led
to comparisons with Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov. Indeed,
he explores a world as unfamiliar to most of his readers as
Tsarist Russia: the Maoist Chinese culture of his youth.
Much of Jin's work is set in Manchuria, the forbidding yet
strategically important northeastern region of China, and his
stories generally take place in the turbulent period from the
mid 1960s to the mid 1980s. His writing focuses on the human
cost of ideolo.....