Yiyun Li

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. 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.
Following a compulsory year of service in the People's Liberation Army, she went on to earn a Bachelor of Science at Peking University in 1996. In the same year she moved to the US. 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, 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.
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 sixteen-year-old son, Vincent, killed himself, which she explored in her 2019 novel Where Reasons End.
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.
Award and honours
Li has received several notable fellowships, including the Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas; a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2010), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020).
In 2007, Granta named Li in their 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, she 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."
Publications
Novels
Memoir
Short fiction
Collections
Short stories
Essays and reporting
References
External links
Profile at The Whiting Foundation
"The Rumpus Interview with Yiyun Li", January 14, 2009
January 2009 interview with Yiyun Li
"Executioner Songs", The Wall Street Journal, JANUARY 30, 2009
"Interviews: Yiyun Li", Identity Theory
Articles by Yuyun Li on her UK publisher's blog, 5th Estate
Yiyun Li speaks about Gold Boy, Emerald Girl on KRUI's The Lit Show
Video: The Story Prize reading with Anthony Doerr and Suzanne Rivecca. March 2, 2011.
1972 births
Living people
21st-century Chinese novelists
21st-century Chinese short story writers
21st-century Chinese women writers
Chinese emigrants to the United States
Exophonic writers
University of Iowa alumni
Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni
Peking University alumni
MacArthur Fellows
University of California, Davis faculty
Princeton University faculty
Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winners
The New Yorker people
Writers from Beijing
O. Henry Award winners