Chinese writer and professor
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,[1][2] the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End,[3] and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose.[4] She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.[5]
Biography
Li was born and raised in Beijing, China.[6][7] Her mother was a teacher and her father worked as a nuclear physicist.[8] 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.[9]
Following a compulsory year of service in the People's Liberation Army,[6] she went on to earn a Bachelor of Science at Peking University in 1996. In the same year she moved to the US.[1] In 2000, she earned an Master of Science in immunology at the University of Iowa.[10] 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.[10]
Li's stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker,[11] 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.
Yiyun Li lived in Oakland, California from 2005- 2008 with her husband and their two sons. During that time, she taught at Mills College.[12] From 2008-2017, she moved out of Oakland to assume a faculty position at the Department of English at the University of California, Davis.[12] Since 2017, she has taught creative writing at Princeton University.[12]
Li had a breakdown in 2012 and attempted suicide twice.[13][9] 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."[13] Her experiences with depression resulted in her 2017 memoir Dear Friend.[13] A few months after the book was published, her sixteen-year-old son, Vincent, killed himself,[9][10] which she explored in her 2019 novel Where Reasons End.[14][15]
In September 2022, Li published The Book of Goose a tale of a literary hoax spun by two thirteen-year-old girls in post-war France. The New York Times described it as 'an existential fable that illuminates the tangle of motives behind our writing of stories.'.[16] In April 2023, the novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.[17]
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.[18] On 16 February 2024, her nineteen-year-old son, James, was fatally hit by a train in the Princeton township.[19]
Award and honours
Li has received several notable fellowships, including the Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas; a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2010),[20][21] and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020).[22]
In 2007, Granta named Li in their list of the 21 best young American novelists.[23] 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,[24] and in 2013, she judged the Man Booker International Prize.[25]
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,[26][27][28] and in 2022, she won the PEN/Malamud Award, which "recognizes writers who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in the short story form."[29][30]
In 2023, she was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer.[31]
In 2024, she was named a finalist for The Story Prize.[32]
