Ha Jin

Ha Jin is the kind of writer I admire without reservation. Leaving China and choosing to write in English, then winning the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner not once but twice, reflects a discipline that genuinely humbles me. Picking the pen name 'Ha' from Harbin, the city he loved, tells you he's a man attached to place and memory. Few things are harder than earning literary honors in a second language, and his roots in the Misty Poetry movement suggest a real obsession with the texture of words. I prefer quiet, weighty work to spectacle, and he delivers exactly that.

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Name (English)

Ha Jin

Name (Japanese)

ハ・ジン

Reading

は・じん

Born

February 21, 1956 (age 70)

Origin

Jinzhou, People's Republic of China

Occupation

poet / short story writer / novelist / university teacher / writer

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Pisces / Monkey

University

Heilongjiang University

Awards & achievements

• 1999 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1999 National Book Award
• 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
• 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
• 1997 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award
• 2001 Asian American Literary Awards
• 2008 Berlin Prize
• 2008 Great Immigrants Award

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha%20Jin
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%8F%E3%83%BB%E3%82%B8%E3%83%B3
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q121778

Tags

• poet
• short story writer
• novelist

Last updated

September 18, 2026

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.