Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li (born November 4, 1972) is a Chinese-born writer. She writes exclusively in English. 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 abuse by her mother.

In 1991, Li fulfilled a compulsory year of service in the People's Liberation Army After earning a Bachelor of Science at Peking University in 1996, she moved to the U.S. She left a PhD program in immunology to pursue writing. In 2005, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction and fiction from The Nonfiction Writing Program and the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. The Paris Review, Harper's, 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.

From 2005 to 2008, Li lived in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons. During that time, she taught at Mills College. In 2008, she moved from Oakland to join the faculty at the Department of English at the University of California, Davis.

As a result of her experiences with depression, she wrote her 2017 memoir Dear Friend.

In September 2022, Li published The Book of Goose, a tale of a literary hoax spun by two 13-year-old girls in postwar France. The New York Times called it "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.

Li was appointed the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University in 2022, succeeding Jhumpa Lahiri.

On February 16, 2024, Li's 19-year-old son, James, was fatally hit by a train in Princeton. The Middlesex County Medical Examiner's Office ruled his death a suicide. This was the same method her son Vincent had used. In 2025, Li published Things in Nature Merely Grow, a memoir about Vincent's and James's deaths and an exploration of the ways in which words fail but are still necessary.

Award and honors Li has received several notable fellowships, including the Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas; a MacArthur Foundation fellowship; and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 2007, Granta included Li on its list of the 21 best young American novelists. In 2010, she was listed among The New Yorkers "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, Li 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, Li was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer.

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

Li was chosen to serve as a judge for the 2024 Booker Prize, alongside Edmund de Waal (chair), Sara Collins, Justine Jordan, and Nitin Sawhney.

In 2026, Li received an Andrew Carnegie Medal +Awards for Li's writing Year Title Award Result Ref. 2005

Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award Winner

California Book Award for Fiction Winner Guardian First Book Award Winner PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel Winner

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl Finalist RUSA Notable Books for Adults Selection

Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award Shortlist NCIBA Book of the Year Award for Fiction Winner St. Francis College Literary Prize Finalist International Dublin Literary Award Finalist 2015 Sunday Times Short Story Award Winner 2020 Where Reasons End PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Winner

Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction Longlist PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Winner 2024 Wednesday's Child Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Baillie Gifford Prize Longlist National Book Award for Nonfiction Finalist National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography Longlist Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography Winner Printed under the title "A matter of facts".