As a teenager during China's Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin served as an uneducated soldier in the People's Liberation Army. Thirty years later, a resident of the United States, he won the National Book Award for his novel "Waiting," completing a trajectory that has established him as one of the most admired exemplars of world literature. Ha Jin's journey raises rich and fascinating questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world--questions that take center stage in "The Writer as Migrant," his first work of nonfiction. Consisting of three interconnected essays, this book sets Ha Jin's own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of his birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov--who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing--are enlisted to explore a migrant author's conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie--refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration. Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin's mental library, "The Writer as Migrant" is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.

哈金　Ha Jin

本名金雪飛，1956年出生於中國遼寧省。曾在中國人民解放軍中服役五年。在校主攻英美文學，1982年畢業於黑龍江大學英語系，1984年獲山東大學英美文學碩士。1985年，赴美留學，並於1992年獲布蘭戴斯大學（Brandeis University）博士學位。現任教於美國波士頓大學。

著有三本詩集：《沉默之間》（Between Silences: A Voice from China）、《面對陰影》（Facing Shadows）和《殘骸》（Wreckage）；另外有短篇小說集《光天化日》（Under the Red Flag）、《好兵》（Ocean of Words: Army Stories）和《新郎》（The Bridegroom）；長篇小說《池塘》（In the Pond）、《等待》（Waiting）、《戰廢品》（War Trash）、《瘋狂》（The Crazed）、《自由生活》（A Free Life）。

短篇小說集《好兵》獲得1997年「美國筆會／海明威獎」。《新郎》一書獲得兩獎項：亞裔美國文學獎，及The Townsend Prize小說獎。長篇小說《等待》獲得1999年美國「國家書卷獎」和2000年「美國筆會／福克納小說獎」，為第一位同時獲此兩項美國文學獎的中國作家，該書迄今已譯成二十多國語言出版。《戰廢品》則入選2004年《紐約時報》十大好書、「美國筆會／福克納小說獎」，入圍2005年普利茲文學獎。

《在他鄉寫作》（The Writer as Migrant）是哈金第一本評論集，以二○○六年應邀在美國萊斯大學（Rice University）發表的三篇演講整理而成。2009年出版最新短篇小說集《落地》（A Good Fall）。