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Yiyun Li Biography

Yiyun Li was born in 1972 in Beijing. Along with her parents and one sister, she lived in an apartment complex built as housing for employees of the Department of Nuclear Industry, where her father worked as a physicist. In 1991 Li reported to Xinyang to complete one year of service in the Chinese army before going to college. After receiving her bachelor of science from Peking University, in 1996 she moved to the United States to study immunology at the University of Iowa. However, after taking a writing course as a way to improve her English, she found herself writing fiction. She decided to change the focus of her studies, entering the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop after receiving her master of science in 2000. She earned her master of fine arts in 2005 with a focus on fiction and creative nonfiction.

Soon after Li’s short stories began appearing in major U.S. magazines, publishers at Random House sought her out for a collection. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers was published in 2005, with stories focusing on Chinese or Chinese American characters and expl

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Yiyun Li

For the Chinese-born American writer Yiyun Li, fiction can be a way to retrieve memory, to escape circumstance, or to reclaim one’s consciousness from the influence of others. Her books, which include five acclaimed novels, two short story collections, and two books of nonfiction, are richly observed, and deeply felt.

Li's collection of short stories Wednesday’s Child, was named a Best Book of 2023 by the Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Esquire, NPR, and Kirkus. Kirkus called it “Quiet, beautiful accounts of journeys through hell.” Her next book will be a memoir titled Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 20, 2025), a remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. She is also working on a novel.

Her novel, The Book of Goose, won the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It tells of two girls raised in the French countryside following WWII. In its starred review, BookPage wrote, “Not since E

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In The Vagrants, you tell the stories of two young women, Nini and Gu Shan. Nini, especially, is a very unusual character. Why did you choose to hinge so much of the tale on her?

I feel very attached to Nini. When I grew up in China, there was so much focus on heroism, or motherism. And Gu Shan was a beautiful woman, she was a tragic heroine and she was a martyr, but Nini was the opposite of Gu Shan. You could not find anything of the martyr or heroine in her. I felt there was so much life in that character. It was very, very hard for me to write a beautiful character like Gu Shan. The more complex a character is, the easier it is for me to spend a long time with her, as I could with Nini.

You chose to write this novel about a very particular time in Chinese history. Do you feel that as a burden—that people here may be reading you not just for the experience of the novel, but to get some insight into the history and culture of China?

I don’t feel the obligation to represent China, but I would hate to misrepresent it. I’m a fiction writer; it’s very hard not to make up thi