Esme Weijun Wang

Esmé Weijun Wang was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, while she was an undergraduate at Yale, which then withdrew her involuntarily; she finished her degree at Stanford and later took an MFA at Michigan. The Collected Schizophrenias, published by Graywolf in 2019 after winning that press's nonfiction prize, is thirteen essays on living inside a diagnosis and on the distance between a clinical category and the person it gets applied to. She writes about the label itself, about involuntary hospitalisation, about late-stage Lyme disease, and about how much of her competence readers are willing to credit once they know. It took a Whiting Award and reached the national bestseller lists. Her novel The Border of Paradise appeared in 2016, and Granta named her among its best young American novelists in 2017.