Yiyun Li Wins Pulitzer Prize for Her Memoir 'Things in Nature Merely Grow'
On May 4, the 2026 Pulitzer Prizes were announced, and Chinese-American writer Yiyun Li won the prize in Memoir or Autobiography for 'Things in Nature Merely Grow' — adding one of American letters' highest honors to a career that already includes a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
The Pulitzer citation calls the book a deeply moving and revelatory account of losing her younger son a little more than six years after her older son died in the same manner. In spare, lucid prose, Li writes about her two sons — Vincent, who died in 2017 at 16, and James, who died in 2024 at 19 — and about her conviction that she must live 'among facts.' The memoir won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction in January and was a National Book Award finalist.
Born in Beijing in 1972, Li came to the United States in 1996 and earned a master's degree in immunology and MFAs at the University of Iowa. She is now a professor in the humanities at Princeton University. Her books include 'A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,' 'The Book of Goose' and 'Wednesday's Child,' and she is regarded as one of the leading Chinese writers in English-language literature today. (GSM, based on the Pulitzer Prizes and public reporting)
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：李翊云2015年在法国出席文学活动。图片来源：Wikimedia Commons（CC BY 3.0，Librairie Mollat 摄）。Photo: Yiyun Li at a literary event in France in 2015. Source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0), Librairie Mollat.
