Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li
Native name	李翊雲
Born	(1972-11-04) November 4, 1972 (age 51) Beijing, China
Occupation	Author, professor
Language	English
Education	Peking University (BS) University of Iowa (MS, MFA)
Notable works	A Thousand Years of Good Prayers The Vagrants The Book of Goose
Notable awards	MacArthur Fellow Guggenheim Fellowship
Children	2
Website
yiyunli.com

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] Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.^[5] She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.^[6]

Li was born and raised in Beijing, China.^[7][8] Her mother was a teacher and her father worked as a nuclear physicist.^[9] 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.^[10]

Following a compulsory year of service in the People's Liberation Army,^[7] 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.^[11] 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.^[11]

Li's stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker,^[12] 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.^[13] From 2008-2017, she moved out of Oakland to assume a faculty position at the Department of English at the University of California, Davis.^[13] Since 2017, she has taught creative writing at Princeton University.^[13]

Li had a breakdown in 2012 and attempted suicide twice.^[14][10] 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."^[14] Her experiences with depression resulted in her 2017 memoir Dear Friend.^[14] A few months after the book was published, her sixteen-year-old son, Vincent, killed himself,^[10][11] which she explored in her 2019 novel Where Reasons End.^[15][16]

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."^[17] In April 2023, the novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.^[18]

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.^[19]

On 16 February 2024, her nineteen-year-old son, James, was fatally hit by a train in the Princeton township.^[20] His death was ruled a suicide by the Middlesex County Medical Examiner’s Office.^[21]

Li has received several notable fellowships, including the Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas; a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2010),^[22][23] and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020).^[24]

In 2007, Granta named Li in their list of the 21 best young American novelists.^[25] 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,^[26] and in 2013, she judged the Man Booker International Prize.^[27]

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,^[28][29][30] and in 2022, she won the PEN/Malamud Award, which "recognizes writers who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in the short story form."^[31][32]

In 2023, she was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer.^[33]

In 2024, she was named a finalist for The Story Prize.^[34]

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (March 2015)

• — (2009). The Vagrants. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6313-0. LCCN 2008023467. OCLC 229028064.
• — (2014). Kinder Than Solitude. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6814-2. LCCN 2013017307. OCLC 842323189.
• — (2019). Where Reasons End. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-984817-37-2. LCCN 2018013429. OCLC 1030447783.
• — (2020). Must I Go. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-399-58912-6. LCCN 2019048747. OCLC 1125306132.
• — (2022). The Book of Goose. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-60634-3. LCCN 2022022703. OCLC 1289234580.

• Li, Yiyun (2017). Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Random House.

• Li, Yiyun (2005). A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Random House.
• — (2010). Gold boy, emerald girl. Random House.
• — (2023). Wednesday's Child. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Li, Yiyun (December 22–29, 2014). "Listening is believing". Inner Worlds. The New Yorker. Vol. 90, no. 41. p. 88.
• — (January 2, 2017). "To speak is to blunder : choosing to renounce a mother tongue". Personal History. The New Yorker. Vol. 92, no. 43. pp. 30–33.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Yiyun Li.

• 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.