Yiyun Li

Li was born in Beijing and served briefly in the People's Liberation Army before studying immunology at Peking University, then moved to the United States in 1996 for a PhD in the subject at the University of Iowa, only to abandon science there for the Iowa Writers' Workshop, choosing to write exclusively in English, a language she has said let her leave her first one behind entirely.

The Vagrants (2009), her first novel, follows an entire fictional town, Muddy River, through the days around the state execution of a young woman denounced as a counterrevolutionary, its wide cast of neighbors, officials, and bystanders exposing the era's collective complicity and rare, quiet decency alike.

She has written of her own two suicide attempts and the 2017 suicide of her teenage son Vincent in unflinching later work, and cites William Trevor and Chekhov as the writers she reveres above all others; she teaches creative writing at Princeton University.