Authors 2008

Ha Jin

Jin was born in Liaoning, China in 1956. His father was a military officer and Jin joined the Chinese liberation army in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution. Jin was under a scholarship at the Brandeis University in 1985, the United States, when the 1989 Tiananmen incident broke out. The government's forcible put-down hastened his decision to emigrate. He remained in the United States after his PhD in 1992, publishing his first book of poems, Between Silences, in 1990.
He sets many of his stories and novels in China, in the fictional locale of Muji City. He has won a number of awards for his writing, including The National Book Award for his novel, Waiting (1999). Many of his short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories anthologies, and his collection Under The Red Flag (1997) won The Flannery Connor Award in fiction while Ocean of Words (1996) has been awarded the PEN-Hemingway Award. He currently teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. The Italian translation of A Free Life, will be released shortly by Neri Pozza.

Monica Morzenti

Professor at the Università degli studi di Bergamo, translates from English and, with Maria Gottardo, from Chinese. Besides all of Ha Jin’s novels, she has translated various authors amongst P.G. Wodehouse, Gish Jen, Jiang Rong, Wang Gang, Zhang Ailing. For her translation from Chinese she received the Primo nazionale for the 2006 translation of the Ministry of Culture.