Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li is a Chinese-American novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the most important literary voices of her generation. Born in Beijing, she studied immunology at Peking University before emigrating to the United States, where she received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and an MFA in nonfiction from Iowa. Her debut short story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, among others. Her novel The Vagrants (2009), set during China's Cultural Revolution, was a finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction. Where Reasons End (2019), a novel written in dialogue with her son Vincent after his death by suicide at age sixteen, won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. The book is a sustained meditation on grief, language, and parental love. Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025), written after the death of her second son James at age nineteen, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Li has won the Lannan Literary Foundation Award and the MacArthur Fellowship (2010). She teaches in the MFA program at Princeton University. Her work is celebrated for its emotional precision, moral complexity, and sustained attention to the interior lives of people living under authoritarian pressure.