James Han Mattson On Returning to His Birth Country

“I feel like before Korea, I was actively avoiding writing about fracture and race and identity. And while I was in Korea, I realized that this is what I need to write about, because this is where my soul is, essentially.”

James Han Mattson was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in North Dakota. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received grants from the Copernicus Society of America and Humanities North Dakota. He is the author of two novels: The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves (Little A: 2017) and Reprieve (William Morrow/Harper Collins and BloomsburyUK: 2021), which was a Fall 2021 Book Pick by The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Chicago Tribune, O Quarterly, Esquire, and Entertainment Weekly, among others. He is currently the fiction editor of Hyphen Magazine.