Ha Jin was born in China in 1956.

He has published two collections of poetry, Between Silences and Facing Shadows, and two collections of short fiction, Ocean of Words, which received the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for fiction as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. In 2004, he published War Trash, which also won the PEN/Faulkner Award. His most recent book is A Free Life.

He lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.