A woman with short dark hair and glasses, wearing a black blouse and light pants, sits indoors with her hands clasped around her knees, looking up and smiling softly against a wooden background.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the most recent, Things in Nature Merely Grow, which won the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal and was a finalist for National Book Award and PEN/Jean Stein award.  She is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, PEN/Jean Stein Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, an International Writer Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Li is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.