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Audio Interview with Ha Jin on: The Writer as Migrant

Ha Jin was born in China in 1956. After Tiananmen Square, he emigrated to the United States. Unlike most exiled writers Ha Jin was not established in his native language; he had no audience in Chinese, and so chose to write in English.
 
He has published three collections of poetry, including Between Silences and Facing Shadows, and three collections of short fiction, Ocean of Words, received the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Under the Red Flag, won the Flannery O’Connor Award. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for fiction as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. In 2004, he published War Trash, which also won the PEN/Faulkner Award.  He lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.

We met recently in Ottawa to talk about his first book of non-fiction The Writer as Migrant (University of Chicago Press). Adapted from The Rice University Campbell Lecture he delivered in 2006, the book consists of  three interconnected essays exploring the experience of migrant,  ‘exiled’ writers in relation to their ‘home’ countries and languages.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn,  Lin Yutang, Homer, Joseph Conrad , Vladimir Nabokov and others all contribute to the conversation. Please listen here:
 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 4:26 PM and is filed under AUDIO: Author Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Audio Interview with Ha Jin on: The Writer as Migrant”

  1. Ron Slate Says:
    July 21st, 2009 at 5:10 PM

    Nigel —

    Here’s my take on Ha Jin’s book from last December. Good to see you keeping interest in it going. Ron

    http://ronslate.com.s6980.gridserver.com/writer_migrant_essays_ha_jin_university_chicago_press

  2. Joy Stocke Says:
    July 21st, 2009 at 5:43 PM

    Beautiful and very interesting interview about language, nationality and the perspective of writing and writers.

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