Skip to main content

Krys Lee

Biography

Krys Lee

Krys Lee is the author of the short story collection DRIFTING HOUSE and HOW I BECAME A NORTH KOREAN. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, the Honor Title in Adult Fiction Literature from the Asian/Pacific American Libraries Association, and a finalist for the BBC International Story Prize. Her fiction, journalism, and literary translations have appeared in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, San Francisco Chronicle, Corriere della Sera and The Guardian, among others. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Yonsei University, Underwood International College, in South Korea.

Krys Lee

Books by Krys Lee

How I Became a North Korean
by Krys Lee - Fiction

Yongju is an accomplished student from one of North Korea's most prominent families. Jangmi, on the other hand, has had to fend for herself since childhood, most recently by smuggling goods across the border. Then there is Danny, a Chinese-American teenager whose quirks and precocious intelligence have long made him an outcast in his California high school. These three disparate lives converge when they flee their homes, finding themselves in a small Chinese town just across the river from North Korea. But will they find their way to the better lives they risked everything for?

Drifting House
by Krys Lee - Fiction, Short Stories

Spanning Korea and the United States, from the postwar era to contemporary times, Krys Lee's stories illuminate a people torn between the traumas of their collective past and the indignities and sorrows of their present.