Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996 to pursue a Ph.D. in immunology but stopped short to become a writer. She has an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an M.F.A. in creative non-fiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories and elsewhere.
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. She was recently selected by Granta as one of the Best Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into more than ten languages.
Her novel, The Vagrants, is set in China right after the Cultural Revolution. It weaves the stories of several otherwise unrelated characters around a common event — the execution of a one-time Cultural Revolutionary for subsequent “counterrevolutionary” thinking. For a glowing review by the N.Y. Times, click here.
KJ
