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Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li has received the Frank O’ Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and the Guardian First Book Award.

She grew up in Beijing and attended Peking University. She came to the United States in 1996 to study medicine and started writing two years later. After receiving a master’s degree in immunology from the University of Iowa, she attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received an MFA.

The author of The Vagrants and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Li was selected for a Whiting Award, and by Granta as one of the best young American novelists under thirty-five. Her most recent collection of stories Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, will be published in September 2010.

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

Articles by Yiyun Li

Friday September 2

Yiyun Li on Sketches from a Hunter’s Album

You walk into Turgenev’s stories as into a dream that you have often had: the darkened faces of peasant women behind the fire, the hooves of the horses stirring a sleeping village, boys of seven and eight pondering death and fate on a summer night, and, of course, the seriousness of every character living his or her life—with the narrator’s thoughts accompanying you. Nothing comforts a reader more than a book that will never die.