Yiyun Li

Li trained as an immunologist and came to the United States for a doctorate in the field before leaving science, and she writes only in English, having set Chinese aside as a private decision. Her fiction is precise and withholding; The Book of Goose turns on two village girls and the book one of them is made to author. She has written directly about her own hospitalisations in Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Her son Vincent died in 2017 at sixteen and her son James in 2024 at nineteen. Where Reasons End is a conversation with the first. She teaches at Princeton.