Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li is a fiction writer whose spare and quietly understated style of storytelling draws readers into powerful and emotionally compelling explorations of her characters’ struggles, set both in China and the United States. Her prose in this second language bears the inflections of her mother tongue and culture, lending a vivid and arresting quality to the voices and experiences she presents to English-speaking readers. 

After moving from China to the United States in 1996 to pursue a graduate degree in immunology at the University of Iowa, Li shifted her studies to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and focused on fiction writing in her adopted language of English.

Yiyun Li appears in the following:

Cursed With Mom Guilt? Charlie Brown Might Cure What Ails You

Saturday, April 12, 2014

The job description for a parent should be straightforward: The only requirement is the skill to do everything perfectly under the pressure of guilt.

Forget perfectly — even passably can be difficult. For a long time my older son only ate apples: apples for breakfast and apples for lunch and ...

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Kinder than Solitude, a Novel by Yiyun Li

Wednesday, April 09, 2014

Yiyun Li discusses her new novel, Kinder than Solitude, which moves back and forth in time, between America today and China in the 1990s, and follows the story of three people whose lives are changed by a murder one of them may have committed.

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The Vagrants

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Set in China's Cultural Revolution, Yiyun Li's novel The Vagrants tells the story of a young Red Guard leader who receives the death penalty for her counterrevolutionary writings.

Event: Yiyum Li will be speaking
Tuesday, February 17 at 7 pm
The Asia Society
725 Park Avenue, ...

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