Yiyun Li (born November 4, 1972) is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.

Biography

Li was born and raised in Beijing, China. Her mother was a teacher and her father worked as a nuclear physicist. In Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, Li recounts moments from her early life, including the abuse she received from her mother. In 1991, Li fulfilled a compulsory year of service in the People's Liberation Army in Xinyang as part of her obligations before pursuing her college education. After earning a Bachelor of Science at Peking University in 1996, she moved to the U.S. In 2000, she earned an Master of Science in immunology at the University of Iowa. In 2005, she earned an Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction and fiction from The Nonfiction Writing Program and the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Li's stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper's, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Two of the stories from A Thousand Years of Good Prayers were adapted into 2007 films directed by Wayne Wang: The Princess of Nebraska and the title story, which Li adapted herself. From 2005 to 2008, Li lived in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons. During that time, she taught at Mills College. In 2008, she moved out of Oakland to join the faculty at the Department of English at the University of California, Davis. Since 2017, she has taught creative writing at Princeton University. Li had a breakdown in 2012 and attempted suicide twice. After recuperating and leaving the hospital, she lost interest in writing fiction, and for a whole year, she focused on reading several biographies, memoirs, diaries and journals. According to her, reading about other people's lives "was a comfort". Her experiences with depression resulted in her 2017 memoir ''Dear Friend. A few months after the book was published, her 16-year-old son, Vincent, killed himself, which she explored in her 2019 novel Where Reasons End. '' In September 2022, Li published The Book of Goose, a tale of a literary hoax spun by two 13-year-old girls in postwar France. The New York Times called it "an existential fable that illuminates the tangle of motives behind our writing of stories." In April 2023, the novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Li has taught fiction at the University of California, Davis, and is a professor of creative writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Li was appointed the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University in 2022, succeeding Jhumpa Lahiri. In this role, she focuses on fostering a vibrant community for aspiring writers at the university. On February 16, 2024, Li's 19-year-old son, James, was fatally hit by a train in the Princeton township. The Middlesex County Medical Examiner's Office ruled his death a suicide.

Award and honours

Li has received several notable fellowships, including the Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas; a MacArthur Foundation fellowship; and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007, Granta included Li on its list of the 21 best young American novelists. In 2010, she was listed among The New Yorker's "20 Under 40". In 2012, Li was selected as a judge for The Story Prize after having been a finalist for the award in 2010, and in 2013, she judged the Man Booker International Prize. In 2014, Li won The American Academy of Arts and Letters's Benjamin H. Danks Award. In 2020, she won the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction, and in 2022, she won the PEN/Malamud Award, which "recognizes writers who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in the short story form." In 2023, Li was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer. In 2024, Li was named a finalist for The Story Prize. Li was chosen to serve as a judge for the 2024 Booker Prize, alongside Edmund de Waal (chair), Sara Collins, Justine Jordan, and Nitin Sawhney.

Publications

Novels

Memoir

Short fiction

Collections

Short stories

Essays and reporting