Biography
Jenny Han was born in 1980 in Richmond, Virginia, and grew up in a Korean-American family. She studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received her MFA in Creative Writing from the New School in New York City.
Her first novel, Shug, was published in 2006. She is best known for two major series: the Summer trilogy (The Summer I Turned Pretty, 2009; It's Not Summer Without You, 2010; We'll Always Have Summer, 2011) and the To All the Boys I've Loved Before trilogy (2014–2017), which was adapted into a hugely successful Netflix film series beginning in 2018.
Han's work is characterised by its precise attention to sensory detail — the specific textures of summer, of adolescence, of particular places — and its emotional honesty about the complexity of romantic feeling. Her books deal with love triangles, grief, and the transition from childhood to adulthood with equal sensitivity.
The To All the Boys adaptations brought Han's work to a global audience and made her one of the most widely read YA authors in the world. The Summer I Turned Pretty was adapted as a Prime Video series in 2022, which significantly increased the novel's readership among younger audiences.