My name is Jimin Kang, and I am a writer and Knight-Hennessy scholar pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where I'm exploring what it means to read and write literature at a time of great environmental change.

 

I was born in South Korea, raised in Hong Kong, and lived in Brazil and the United States—studying Spanish & Portuguese at Princeton—before moving to Oxford, where I completed one master's in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation, and another in Nature, Society & Environmental Governance. 

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My writing—in the form of essays, fiction, translation, and literary criticism—has been published in outlets including The New York Times, The Nation, Joyland, Wasafiri, and Poets & Writers, where I've written on topics ranging from giving up English for Lent to the phenomenon of AI-generated audiobooks. In 2022, I was a finalist for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for fiction, and in 2021 received an Honorable Mention in the Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest.

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I speak English, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese, though I write and work primarily in the first two (or four, if I'm being generous). I've previously worked as a journalist with the Brazil bureau of Reuters and as an editor at The Oxonian Review, where I launched a column on Hong Kong writing.

 

My debut novel, titled Lessons in Attention, will be published with Tin House in late 2026. You can follow me here for any and all updates. Thanks for stopping by!