Phillip Adams, host of the Australian news radio show Late Night Live, recently conducted an interview with poet and novelist Ha Jin, a Chinese ex-pat who struggled through his country’s Cultural Revolution as an uneducated soldier in the People’s Liberation Army to eventually become one of the United States’ most admired writers of world literature. Jin has authored numerous semi-fictional books about China and Chinese culture in the English language including his most famous Waiting and War Trash.
In the interview, he discusses his hard fought journey to literary stardom and the new place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world—topics that also take center stage in his most recent book The Writer as Migrant, a book that places his own life as a literary exile alongside those of other migrant writers from Nabokov to Naipaul.
Listen to the archived audio of the interview on the Late Night Live website.
Or, find out more about The Writer as Migrant.