Yiyun Li, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for memoir and acclaimed author, will preview her new novel and speak about her work for the Asian American Distinguished Speaker Series lecture at 5:30 p.m. on October 6 (Tuesday) in the Eck Visitors Center at the University of Notre Dame. Author Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, the Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English, will moderate the livestreamed event, which is free and open to the public.
“Yiyun Li is a singular author, and we are honored to celebrate the launch of her newest work,” said Kyle Jaros, interim director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, which organizes the event. “The courage of Li’s prose is remarkable, as is her ability to bridge continents in writing.”
Born in China and raised amid the final years of the Mao Zedong era and the transformations of reform, Li moved to the United States in 1996, studying immunology at the University of Iowa before turning to writing fiction and becoming a US citizen in 2012. Li now serves as the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities and professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
In May, Li won the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, awarded by the American Library Association, for her 2025 memoir “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” her account of losing her younger son to suicide six years after her older son died in the same manner. Suicide and mental health will be topics of Li’s conversation.
“Yiyun Li is one of our greatest writers. Her sentences are live wires: precise and ephemeral in equal measure,” said Van der Vliet Oloomi, a Liu Institute faculty fellow. “Li has that rare, unnameable gift of transforming the reader who encounters her work. She writes about grief, friendship, and what it means to be a writer with extraordinary intimacy and mastery.”
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Li is the recipient of the 2021 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a Whiting Award, MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, Princeton University’s Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, and the Royal Society of Literature’s International Writers Award. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, “The Best American Short Stories,” and “The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories,” among other publications.
Li’s visit will precede the official launch on October 13 of “Music Against the Night” by Macmillan Publishers, the first work in a trilogy that follows two eighteenth-century musicians as they pursue their ambitions from Dublin and French India across Europe, while grappling with political and artistic upheaval and sacrifice. The novel will be for sale at Li’s Notre Dame appearance.
The Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies organizes the Asian American Distinguished Speaker Series, which honors innovative, creative, and effective Asian American leaders and celebrates their contributions. This year’s lecture is sponsored with support from the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Department of English, Department of American Studies, Gender Studies Program, Creative Writing Program, University Writing Center, Initiative on Race and Resilience, and the Institute for Social Concerns.
Part of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, the Liu Institute promotes awareness, understanding and knowledge of Asia through administering a supplementary major and minor in Asian studies, supporting student and faculty scholarship, organizing public events, and facilitating interaction and exchanges with partners in Asia. The institute was established by a gift from the RM Liu Foundation that supports the philanthropic activities of Robert and Mimi Liu and their children, Emily and Justin, both Notre Dame graduates.