This month’s guest is McArthur Genius Grant winner, Yiyun Li talking about her memoir Dear Friend, From My Life I Write To You In Your Life.
Born and raised in China, Yi’s parents were victims of the cultural revolution but still encouraged their daughter to succeed in anything she chose to do. And succeed she did. Word By Word listeners may recall her conversation with Gil Mansergh where she explained how she wrote her first novel, The Vagrants in English and won the Gold Medal of California Book Award for first fiction. Since then, her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40, and the MacArthur Foundation named her a 2010 fellow. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space. Yiyun Li lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at the University of California, Davis.
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