Jane Park is a second-generation Korean Canadian writer. She is a MacDowell Fellow, and was a participant in the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio, and Diaspora Dialogues where she worked on Inheritance. She studied English literature at Queen’s University. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA at the University of British Columbia.

She was born in Edmonton, Alberta, moved around a lot as a child but spent the longest period in Vancouver, BC. She lived in New York for over a decade, and now lives in Calgary, Alberta. 

Inheritance is her first novel.

Welcome to my website!

I wrote my first novel when I was ten years old. That summer, my father sold his grocery store, bought a brown van and drove us across Canada and the US. We hit all the proper places for a road trip: Niagara Falls, Luray Caverns, Mount Rushmore. However, the place that left the biggest impression on me was New York City. It was the 80s. Neighbourhoods were rough and gritty, full of flavour. I returned home and wrote my first novel about a blonde girl who moves to New York. It didn’t strike me as odd that I’d write about a white protagonist with an all-white cast because that was what I read, what made stories legitimate.

Now, many decades later, I have written my second novel about a Korean woman who moves to New York, and returns back to her hometown. My novel is about a daughter of Korean immigrants coming-of-age during the 1980s-90s in a small town. There’s also a present timeline where she has to come to terms with a guilt she has spent her life trying to forget. I have always been interested in kyopos—diasporic Koreans—like myself, born in the US or Canada, with parents who immigrated over after the Korean War. If you’re intrigued, reward your brain, preorder my book, and lose yourself in my world.