Jenny Han, the novelist who insisted the girl at the center had to look like her

Jenny Han

Photo: Navdeep Dhillon / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 3, 1980 Richmond, Virginia, USA
Occupation	Novelist and film director
Awards	Young Adult Asian/Pacific American · Variety Top 50 TV Producers · Emmy (nomination)

The first question Jenny Han remembers being asked about her To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series was not about the writing. It was about the cover. Would the girl on the cover need to be white? Han said no. Lara Jean Song Covey — the Korean-American protagonist she had spent years constructing, the secret letters, the handwriting that gave each feeling its specific weight — was not a character who could be adjusted for a different market. That fight, which she has since described as defining her experience of bringing a book to Hollywood, was one she won. When Netflix adapted the series in 2018 and cast Lana Condor, a Vietnamese-American actress, as Lara Jean, it became briefly a proof of concept for a generation of writers who had been told their stories were too particular to travel.

Han grew up in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of Korean immigrants who treated reading as something close to duty. She moved to New York after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then completed an MFA in Creative Writing at The New School in 2006. The debut novel that came out of that period, Shug, was a middle-grade story about a twelve-year-old navigating the cruelties of seventh grade. It was not yet the work that would define her, but it established the recurring preoccupation: the inner life of a girl the world hasn’t fully registered yet.

The The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy — published between 2009 and 2011 — gave her that definition. Belly, the protagonist, has spent every summer of her life at a beach house shared between two families, and between two boys she loves for different reasons. The books were read as romantic, which they are, but what distinguished them from the genre’s standard offerings was Han’s precision about a very specific emotional experience: returning to a place that has stayed still while you’ve changed. The trilogy reached the New York Times bestseller list and stayed.

The To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy, which began in 2014 with Lara Jean’s accidentally-mailed letters and concluded in 2017, pulled Han into a different conversation — the one about who gets to be the protagonist in mainstream American pop culture. Lara Jean’s Korean-American identity was not a decorative detail in Han’s telling. It shaped how she moved through the world, what she feared, what she performed for her family, what she kept private. The Netflix adaptation of the first book, which arrived in 2018, became one of the platform’s most-rewatched originals. Han served as executive producer across all three films, working to ensure the adaptation stayed continuous with the source’s intent. P.S. I Still Love You earned the Young Adult Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in 2015 and 2016.

Not every decision Han made as her work crossed into television was met without friction. The Amazon Prime Video adaptation of The Summer I Turned Pretty, which she developed as showrunner alongside Sarah Kucserka, departed meaningfully from the source material. Characters were aged up, the romantic triangle was sharpened into something with higher emotional stakes, and the series made structural choices that some readers of the books found at odds with their tone. Han defended each departure publicly as an extension of what the story had always meant to her — not a compromise forced by the medium but the fuller version of the story she’d been building toward. The third season, which aired across the summer of 2025, drew seventy million global viewers in its first seventy days, making it Amazon’s most-watched title of that year.

She created XO, Kitty for Netflix in 2023 — a spinoff following Kitty Song Covey, the younger sister from the To All the Boys trilogy, who travels to Seoul and discovers the city her mother grew up in. The series received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Young Adult Program in 2024. That same year, Variety included Han on its list of the fifty most powerful television producers in the industry.

The day the third season of The Summer I Turned Pretty ended, Amazon announced a feature film set within the same world. Han is directing it — the first film she’ll direct — having co-written the screenplay with Kucserka. Principal photography wrapped in Wilmington, North Carolina, in late July 2026. Lola Tung, Christopher Briney, and Gavin Casalegno return from the series. No release date has been set; Han has confirmed the film will not arrive in 2026. The graphic novel adaptation of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, with art by Akimaro and Li Lu, is out in May 2026.

The question her career has been running alongside for twenty years — who gets to be at the center — is now answered differently depending on which medium you’re asking about. The novels opened a door. The television work kicked it wider. What the film she’s now directing will do with the same question, told this time in the language she hasn’t used before, is what the next chapter turns on.

Tags: writers, Jenny Han, Amazon Prime Video, Lana Condor, The Summer I Turned Pretty, To All the Boys I've Loved Before

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