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. 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.

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.

Yiyun Li lived in Oakland, California from 2005-2008 with her husband and their two sons. During that time, she taught at Mills College. From 2008-2017, she moved out of Oakland to assume a faculty position 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 sixteen-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 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." 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.

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

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."

In 2023, she was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer.

In 2024, she was named a finalist for The Story Prize.