Ha Jin is a novelist, poet, and essayist. Born in China in 1956, Xuefei Jin (Ha Jin is his pen name) was a teenager when China entered the Cultural Revolution. He became a member of the People’s Liberation Army at the age of fourteen. His novel Waiting, which won the National Book Award in 1999 and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2000, was based on his experiences during his five-year service in the Red Army. He received the PEN/Faulkner Award again in 2005 for War Trash. His most recent book is Looking for Tank Man (2025). Though a native of China, he writes in English.
Ha Jin earned his master’s degree at Shandong University in China and, in 1986, came to the United States to begin his doctoral work at Brandeis. He was accepted into Boston University’s Creative Writing Program, where he completed his studies in 1993, and returned in September 2002 as a full professor.
In addition to the National Book Award, Ha Jin received the PEN/Hemingway Award for his first collection of short stories, Ocean of Words (1996), the Flannery O’Connor Award for his second, Under the Red Flag (1997), the Asian American Literary Award for The Bridegroom (2000), and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award for A Distant Center (2019).