Already familiar to readers since winning the National Book Award in 1999 for his earlier novel Waiting, turns in a very different - but highly accomplished - work of fiction. In his new novel, Ha Jin has created such an authentically detailed, first person view of a Chinese Prisoner in a POW camp during the Korean War, that librarians might understandably misfile this one under "autobiography." (Pantheon, USA)

Ha Jin

Ha Jin was born in 1956 in Liaoning Province in northern China. For six years, beginning at age 14, he served in the People's Liberation Army based at the northeastern border between China and the former Soviet Union. While in the army he began teaching himself middle and high-school courses.  After his military service ended, he taught himself English while working the night shift as a railroad telegrapher in Jiamusi, a remote frontier city in the Northeast. During this time he followed the English learner's program, hoping "someday to read Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 in the English original.”

In 1977, when colleges reopened after the Cultural Revolution, he passed the entrance exams and was assigned to study English, although this was his last choice for a major. Ha Jin received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from Chinese universities, and came to the United States in 1985 to do graduate work at Brandeis University, supporting himself as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant and as a night watchman in a factory. 

After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, he decided that, as a writer, he could not return to China. In 1993 he earned a Ph.D. in English from Brandeis.

Ha Jin has published three collections of poetry, Between Silences (1990), Facing Shadows (1996), and Wreckage (2001); and three collections of award-winning short fiction, Ocean of Words (1996), Under the Red Flag (1997), which was also shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize, and The Bridegroom (2001). He has published four novels to date: In the Pond (1998), Waiting, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1999 and the PEN/Faulkner award, The Crazed (2002), and now War Trash.

Ha Jin now lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.

Information about the author excerpted from www.bookbrowse.com and publishers' websites.
Author photo by Jerry Bauer from the Pantheon website.