Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China and moved to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award and was awarded a Lannan Foundation residency. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and Guardian First Book Award. She was selected as one of Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists. Her novel, The Vagrants, was published in February 2009.
