Photo by ©Basso CANNARSA / Opale
Director and Professor of Creative Writing Yiyun Li is one of 12 winners of the Royal Society of Literature’s International Writers Award for 2023.
Now in its third year, the annual, life-long award recognizes the contribution of writers across the globe to literature. This year, writers Tony Birch, Yussef El Guindi, Lorna Goodison, Yaa Gyasi, Han Kang, Attica Locke, Valeria Luiselli, Anne Michaels, Scholastique Mukasonga, Maria Stepanova, and Gao Xingjian were all selected for the award, along with Li. The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) announced its new class of international writers on November 30, which coincided with the society’s 203rd birthday and is part of RSL 200, a five-year festival championing the diversity of writing and writers in the UK. The writers selected for the award are invited to form a global community of authors.
Maureen Freely, Chair of this year’s panel, said in the award announcement, ‘The RSL International Writers programme, now in its third year, is delighted to welcome 12 new writers to the fold. They come to us from five continents and as many languages, with most working across a variety of forms. All are writers of great distinction. Though no two are alike, they share a fascination for erased lives and histories that can, once restored, serve as eloquent reminders of our commonalities as readers, writers, and global citizens.”
Li is the author of eleven books, including Wednesday’s Child, The Book of Goose, Where Reasons End, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, and Tolstoy Together, 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Li’s honors and other awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, the 2021 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Asian American Literary Award for fiction, among others. She is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Li teaches fiction workshops for undergraduate students in Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing.
