Jane Park

A ten-year-old girl wrote stories in the backseat of a brown van crossing between Niagara Falls and Mount Rushmore. In the 1980s, accompanying her father—who had sold their grocery store to cross the continent in order to put down roots in the unfamiliar land of Canada—the girl wrote stories featuring blonde, white girls as protagonists, just like the books she read. At the time, no one had taught her that the stories of Koreans, or the calloused hands of our parents, could inspire literature. Decades later, however, that girl has returned as an author proudly embracing her Korean-Canadian identity. Jane Park’s debut novel, Inheritance: A Novel (2026)—the author was born in Edmonton, Alberta, lived in Vancouver and New York, and is currently based in Calgary—goes beyond a tale of personal growth to reconstruct the immense history of the Korean immigrant community in Canada.

This book instills a deep sense of pride in all of us living in Canada. The loneliness an Asian family must have experienced in the middle of the windswept Prairies of a rural Alberta town in the 1980s has now become a literary asset that will be forever recorded through the hands of author Jane Park. As the author noted on her website (www.janepark.ca), we no longer have to borrow the stories of white girls. The era has come where our faces, our names, our dialects, and our painful histories become the stories read by the world. Her elegant prose, refined during her MFA at the University of British Columbia (UBC), transforms the lives of immigrants from objects of pity into objects of admiration and respect.