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Yiyun Li trained as an immunologist and wrote her first published sentence in a language she did not grow up speaking. She has never written a book in Chinese, and has said English is the language she chose rather than inherited. Across eleven books — three story collections, six novels and two memoirs — she works in a register that stays level whatever it is describing: a public execution in a provincial Chinese town, a poisoning nobody confesses to, two girls in postwar France inventing a book between them, the death of a child. Her 2025 memoir won the Pulitzer Prize. Here are all eleven, in order, and what each one actually is.
By Lisanne Swart · 11 books · Literary Fiction · Memoir · 2005–2026 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Yiyun Li has written eleven books: the story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (2010) and Wednesday’s Child (2023); the novels The Vagrants (2009), Kinder Than Solitude (2014), Where Reasons End (2019), Must I Go (2020), The Book of Goose (2022) and Music Against the Night (due 13 October 2026); and the memoirs Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017) and Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025). She also made Tolstoy Together (2021) with A Public Space. Things in Nature Merely Grow won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography. Born 4 November 1972 in Beijing, Li is professor of creative writing at Princeton and directs its Program in Creative Writing.
Quick facts about Yiyun Li
- Born
- 4 November 1972, Beijing, China
- Books
- 11, from A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005) to Music Against the Night (due October 2026)
- Split
- 6 novels, 3 story collections and 2 memoirs, plus Tolstoy Together (2021)
- Studied
- cell biology at Peking University, then immunology at the University of Iowa — she came to the United States in 1996 as a scientist
- Then
- a double MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in fiction and in creative non-fiction
- Writes in
- English only. She has never published a book in Chinese
- Now
- professor of creative writing at Princeton and director of its Program in Creative Writing, since 2022
- Also
- editor at the Brooklyn literary magazine A Public Space
- Biggest award
- the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography, for Things in Nature Merely Grow
- Nearly twice
- she was a Pulitzer finalist in 2024 for the story collection Wednesday’s Child, two years before she won
All 11 books by Yiyun Li, in order
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Ten stories about Chinese lives at home and in the American diaspora — marriage, family duty, emigration, and what does and does not survive being carried between two countries. The debut took four awards in two years: the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2005, then the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award and a Whiting Award in 2006. Wayne Wang filmed two of the stories, the title story and “The Princess of Nebraska.”
The Vagrants
Her first novel, set in a provincial Chinese town in 1979. It opens with the public execution of a young woman denounced as a counterrevolutionary, and then follows the townspeople through the months afterwards — who spoke, who stayed silent, and what political language does to the people required to repeat it. A finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2011.
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
Nine pieces: the novella “Kindness,” which opens the book, and eight shorter stories. The subjects are solitude and the arrangements people make around it — a woman looking back at a schoolteacher and an army lieutenant, a surrogate pregnancy, a shop beside a prison. A finalist for The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor award again in 2011.
Kinder Than Solitude
Beijing in 1989 and America two decades later. Four young people are close; one of them, Shaoai, is poisoned and lives twenty-one more years with the brain damage it caused. Nobody is ever charged. The novel opens with her death and follows the other three — Ruyu, Moran and Boyang, by then scattered between China and the United States — through what not knowing has done to each of them.
Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
Her first memoir, in nine essays, written during and after two hospitalisations. It is less an account of what happened than a record of what she was reading while it did: Turgenev, Kierkegaard, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, and William Trevor, who gets a chapter of his own. Running underneath is the question of why she writes only in English, a language she came to as an adult, and what it means to have left another one behind.
Where Reasons End
A novel written almost entirely as conversation, between a mother and her son Nikolai, sixteen, who has died by suicide. They talk in no particular place and no particular time, mostly about words: what they can carry, where they fail, and whether arguing with someone is a way of keeping them. Li wrote it after the death of her elder son in 2017. It won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award in 2020.
Must I Go
Lilia Liska is eighty-one, three times widowed, living in a retirement home in California and annotating the published diaries of Roland Bouley, a man she knew briefly at sixteen. Her notes in his margins are the novel. What she is really doing is arguing with her daughter Lucy, who died decades earlier, and the diaries are the only surface she has to write on.
The Book of Goose
Postwar rural France. Fabienne and Agnès are thirteen and inseparable, and Fabienne has an idea: they will make a book, and Agnès will put her name on it. The book is published, Agnès becomes a literary curiosity, and the plan carries her to Paris and an English finishing school and finally to Pennsylvania. She narrates it years later, on hearing that Fabienne is dead. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2023.
Wednesday’s Child
Eleven stories written across fourteen years, so the collection spans a longer stretch of her working life than the publication date suggests. The recurring subjects are grief, ageing and caregiving — what people do in the years after the thing that happened. A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and for the Story Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Things in Nature Merely Grow
Her second memoir, written after the death of her younger son in 2024, some six years after her elder son died in the same way. Li refuses the vocabulary the form usually supplies: she does not call it grieving or mourning, offers no recovery and no consolation, and stays with facts and with what language can and cannot do. The Pulitzer board called it “an austere and defiant memoir of acceptance.” It won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Music Against the Night
Announced as the first volume of a Nocturne Trilogy, and her first historical novel. Two musicians make their way through Europe around the turn of the nineteenth century: John Field, the Dublin prodigy who became a celebrated pianist in Russia and whose nocturnes Chopin later took up, and Adelaide Percheron, orphaned in French India, who leaves Pondicherry for Paris. Their paths run in parallel until Moscow in 1807. Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishes it on 13 October 2026.
The Other Work: Tolstoy, Two Films and a Magazine
The eleven books above are the ones with her name alone on the cover. A few other things get counted as hers in lists online, which is why the number varies from site to site. Here is what those are.
- Tolstoy Together (2021) — with A Public Space — In the spring of 2020 Li led a public read-along of War and Peace, eighty-five days, twelve to fifteen pages a day, with several thousand strangers. The book collects her daily notes alongside readers’ responses. Published by A Public Space Books, and credited to Li and the magazine jointly, which is why it sometimes appears on her list and sometimes does not.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
- Two films, from one collection — Wayne Wang directed A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska, both from stories in her 2005 debut, and both released in 2007. They turn up in searches as though they were separate works of hers; they are adaptations.
- A Public Space — She is an editor at the Brooklyn literary magazine, which is a separate role from her own books and from Tolstoy Together.
- Introductions to other people’s books — She has written introductions to reissued fiction, among them Eileen Chang’s Naked Earth. Her name is on those covers, which is enough to get them filed under books she wrote.
- Prize juries — She judged the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, the Booker Prize in 2024, and The Story Prize. Not books, but they are why her name attaches to a great many titles that are not hers.
Yiyun Li’s Writing: A Level Voice
The most-remarked feature of her prose is that the register does not rise. A public execution, a poisoning, a child’s death: the sentences describing them are built the same way as the ones describing a shop beside a prison. Reviewers reach for the same words for this — austere, level, unsparing — and the Pulitzer board used “austere and defiant” in its citation for Things in Nature Merely Grow.
She writes about language itself more than most novelists do. Dear Friend circles the question of why she works only in English; Where Reasons End is a book in which two people argue almost exclusively about what words can be made to carry; Must I Go is one woman writing in the margins of another person’s sentences. The subject keeps returning because it is the material.
Withheld information is a recurring structure. Kinder Than Solitude is built around a poisoning that is never solved, The Book of Goose around a deception the narrator only explains decades later, and several of the stories in Wednesday’s Child open years after their central event. The reader is generally told what happened and not why.
The range is wider than the reputation. She is often filed as a Chinese-American writer of quiet realism, and the first four books support that. Most of what followed does not: a memoir about reading, a novel in dialogue, an American retirement home, postwar France, and a historical novel about two musicians in Napoleonic Europe.
Yiyun Li Books in Order
In publication order: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), The Vagrants (2009), Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (2010), Kinder Than Solitude (2014), Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017), Where Reasons End (2019), Must I Go (2020), The Book of Goose (2022), Wednesday’s Child (2023), Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025) and Music Against the Night, due on 13 October 2026.
Nothing continues from one book to the next, so there is no sequence you have to respect — with one exception at the end. Music Against the Night is billed as the first volume of a Nocturne Trilogy, which makes it the first book of hers that will have a second part.
What does change across the eleven is the setting. The first four books are largely China: a provincial town in 1979, Beijing in 1989, and the diaspora either side of them. From 2017 onward the books leave that ground entirely — a memoir about reading, a novel in dialogue, a California retirement home, postwar rural France, and now Dublin, Pondicherry, Paris and Moscow. Readers who know her only as a Chinese-American novelist are usually working from the first half of the list.
Where to Start with Yiyun Li
If you want the most decorated book
→ Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025). It won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and was a National Book Award finalist. It is also the hardest of the eleven; see the entry below for what it is about.
If you want the most decorated fiction
→ The Book of Goose (2022), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2023.
If you would rather begin at the beginning
→ A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005). Her debut collection took four awards in two years — the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award and a Whiting Award — and two of its stories were filmed by Wayne Wang.
If you want the shortest way in
→ Where Reasons End (2019) runs to 192 pages and is written almost entirely as dialogue. Short is not the same as easy here: it is a conversation between a mother and her dead son.
Frequently asked questions about Yiyun Li's books
How many books has Yiyun Li written?
Yiyun Li has written eleven books: the story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (2010) and Wednesday’s Child (2023); the novels The Vagrants (2009), Kinder Than Solitude (2014), Where Reasons End (2019), Must I Go (2020), The Book of Goose (2022) and Music Against the Night, due on 13 October 2026; and the memoirs Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017) and Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025). She also made Tolstoy Together (2021) with the magazine A Public Space.
Who is Yiyun Li?
Yiyun Li (born 1972 in Beijing) is a Chinese-American novelist, short-story writer and memoirist who writes only in English. She is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, and her memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography.
Did Yiyun Li win the Pulitzer Prize?
Yes. Things in Nature Merely Grow won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography. She had been a Pulitzer finalist two years earlier, in 2024, for the story collection Wednesday’s Child.
What is Things in Nature Merely Grow about?
It is Yiyun Li’s second memoir, written after the death of her younger son in 2024, some six years after her elder son died in the same way. Li declines the usual vocabulary of grieving and mourning, offers no recovery arc, and stays with facts and with the limits of language. The Pulitzer board described it as an austere and defiant memoir of acceptance. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it in 2025.
Is Where Reasons End a novel or a memoir?
It is published as a novel, though it is drawn directly from Li’s life. It is written almost entirely as a conversation between a mother and her sixteen-year-old son Nikolai, who has died by suicide, and Li wrote it after the death of her elder son in 2017. Both voices in the book are the mother’s, which is part of why it is fiction rather than memoir.
What should I read first by Yiyun Li?
There is no required order, since nothing continues from one book to the next. The most decorated book is the memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025), which won the Pulitzer Prize; the most decorated fiction is The Book of Goose (2022), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award. If you would rather start at the beginning, her debut collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005) won four awards in two years. The shortest book is Where Reasons End (2019), at 192 pages.
What order should I read Yiyun Li’s books in?
Publication order works, and nothing requires it, because the books are independent of one another. The one exception is at the end of the list: Music Against the Night (2026) is announced as the first volume of a Nocturne Trilogy, so it will have sequels.
What is Music Against the Night about?
It is Yiyun Li’s first historical novel and the first volume of a planned Nocturne Trilogy, due from Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 13 October 2026. It follows two musicians in Europe around the turn of the nineteenth century: John Field, the Dublin-born pianist and composer who made his name in Russia, and Adelaide Percheron, orphaned in French India, who travels from Pondicherry to Paris. Their paths converge in Moscow in 1807.
Why does Yiyun Li write in English and not Chinese?
Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996 to study immunology. She began writing in English and has never published a book in Chinese. She has written about the decision at length in her memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017), where she describes English as a language she chose rather than inherited.
Was Yiyun Li a scientist?
Yes. She took a degree in cell biology at Peking University and came to the University of Iowa for a master’s in immunology, which she completed in 2000. She then took a double MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in fiction and in creative non-fiction, finishing in 2005 — the year her first book appeared.
Where does Yiyun Li teach?
Princeton University. She is professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts and has directed its Program in Creative Writing since 2022. She is also an editor at the Brooklyn literary magazine A Public Space.
What awards has Yiyun Li won?
The 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography and the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, both for Things in Nature Merely Grow; the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2023 for The Book of Goose; the PEN/Malamud Award in 2022; the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award in 2020 for Where Reasons End; a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in 2020; a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010; and for her debut, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2005 followed by the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award and a Whiting Award in 2006.
Footnotes
- Yiyun Li — The Pulitzer Prizes
- Yiyun Li — Princeton University, Office of the Dean of the Faculty
- Yiyun Li Wins Pulitzer Prize for Memoir — Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton
- Yiyun Li — Wikipedia
- Yiyun Li — Kirkus Reviews
- Things in Nature Merely Grow — National Book Foundation
- Music Against the Night — Kirkus Reviews
Bibliography last verified 5 October 2026.
“Fiction is tamer than life.”
— Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025).
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