Lan Samantha Chang

Lan Samantha Chang is an American author of Chinese descent. Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1965, to immigrant parents from Shanghai, she studied at Yale University and Harvard and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is currently the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, one of the most prestigious positions in American literary education. Chang is the author of two short story collections and two novels: Inheritance (2004) and The Family Chao (2022), a darkly comic family drama inspired by The Brothers Karamazov, set in a Chinese-American restaurant in a Wisconsin town and exploring themes of immigration, assimilation, family obligation, and violence. The Family Chao won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2023 alongside Geraldine Brooks's Horse, and was a New York Times bestseller. Chang's fiction is distinguished by its formal intelligence, its emotional depth, and its particular attention to the experiences of Chinese immigrant families in America. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and other organisations. She lives in Iowa City.