Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara (born 1974) is an American novelist, editor, and travel writer. Yanagihara grew up in Hawaii. She is best known for her bestselling novel A Little Life, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize, and for being the editor-in-chief of T Magazine. Yanagihara is of Japanese descent through her father and of Korean descent through her mother. As a child, Yanagihara moved frequently with her family, living in Hawaii, New York, Maryland, California and Texas. She attended the Punahou School in Hawaii before graduating from Smith College in 1995.

Yanagihara has said that her father introduced her as a girl to the work of Philip Roth and to "British writers of a certain age", such as Anita Brookner, Iris Murdoch, and Barbara Pym. The book was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize for fiction and the 2016 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2015 Kirkus Prize for fiction. Yanagihara was also selected as a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction. A Little Life defied the expectations of its editor, of Yanagihara's agent, and of the author herself, that it would not sell well.

Her 2015 novel A Little Life has also been adapted for the stage. A theatrical adaptation directed by Ivo van Hove premiered in Amsterdam in 2018 and later ran in London at the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2023.

Yanagihara described writing the book at its best as "glorious as surfing; it felt like being carried aloft on something I couldn't conjure but was lucky enough to have caught, if for just a moment. At its worst, I felt I was somehow losing my ownership over the book. It felt, oddly, like being one of those people who adopt a tiger or lion when the cat's a baby and cuddly and manageable, and then watch in dismay and awe when it turns on them as an adult".

In 2015, she left Condé Nast to become a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. She has said that after her sophomore novel became a best seller, people in the publishing industry were baffled by her decision to take a job at T. Describing the publishing world as "a provincial community, more or less as snobby as the fashion industry", she said, "I'd get these underhanded comments like, 'oh, I never knew there were words [in T Magazine] worth reading'". Of working as an editor while writing fiction on the side, she says, "I've never done it any other way". She announced she was stepping down in 2026.

Yanagihara's third novel, To Paradise, was published on January 11, 2022, and reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list.

In 2025, A Little Life and To Paradise were included on a list of publications that "could harm the national interests of the Republic of Belarus" and banned from distribution in that country.

Awards and honours

Year Book Award Category Result Ref 2015 A Little Life Booker Prize —

Works and publications The People in the Trees, 2013 A Little Life, 2015 To Paradise, 2022