Yiyun li author biography template

Yiyun li mother

Yiyun Li was born in 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 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 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 earned her master of fine arts in with a focus on fiction and creative nonfiction. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers was published in , with stories focusing on Chinese or Chinese American characters and exploring themes of immigration. Her compassion for her own creations persuades us that they are worth caring for.

The title story was adapted into a film directed by Wayne Wang in She followed her debut collection with a novel, The Vagrants , in Set in a Chinese provincial town named Muddy River, it weaves together the lives of various characters affected in diverse ways by a brutal public execution. The novel received the California Book Award for fiction.

She set out, she has said, to write personal stories not centered on politics or history even if they are affected by them. Her short stories have the sparseness and impact of Raymond Carver or Haruki Murakami; simple words forming neat sentences that pack a great emotional punch. Also in , she was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space , and in she translated the letters of Chinese writer Shen Congwen for that magazine.