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.
Yiyun Li
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.