Yiyun Li

Novelist and Author

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. Her novel, The Vagrants, won the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for Dublin IMPAC Award. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, her second collection, was a finalist of Story Prize and shortlisted for Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Kinder Than Solitude, her latest novel, was published to critical acclaim. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Yiyun Li has received numerous awards, including Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, among others. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She has served on the jury panel for Man Booker International Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Heminway Award, and other. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.

She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at University of California, Davis.

Health

Why Is Life Filled with Suffering? Leo Tolstoy’s Lessons on Failure, Identity, and Asking “Why?”

The big, unknowable questions in life are seductive, but without small, trivial questions as insulation, those large mysteries can consume us.

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6 min

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with

Yiyun Li

All Videos

What Psychiatric Wards Teach Us About the Nature of Reality

Novelist and author Yiyun Li tells stories from her stay in a psychiatric hospital: “Sometimes it’s the irrational that is real. Sometimes it’s the unreal that leads to the most rational response.”

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8 min

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with

Yiyun Li