On May 6, Columbia University announced the 108th annual Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Letters, Drama and Music. The short story collection, Wednesday’s Child, by Director and Professor of Creative Writing Yiyun Li and the novel, Same Bed Different Dreams, by Lecturer in Creative Writing Ed Park were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Writer Jayne Anne Phillips was awarded the 2024 Fiction Prize for the novel, Night Watch.
The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is awarded annually to an American author for a work of distinguished fiction, preferably one that deals with American life.
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Li’s short story collection, Wednesday’s Child, was also named a finalist for this year’s Story Prize and L.A. Times Book Prize. It made several best of the year book lists published by The New Yorker, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, L.A. Times, Library Journal, and others. Wednesday’s Child is an affecting volume of thematically and stylistically connected stories that are set around tasks carried out by caretakers of the infirm and mothers struggling to carry on after the death of a child, work that mixes grief with gentle humor.
Park’s novel, Same Bed Different Dreams, recently won the L.A. Times Book Prize in fiction. It was also listed among the best books of 2023 by The New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, and others. Same Bed Different Dreams, which is Park’s second novel, is an inventive postmodern work that moves from the brutal Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula to a lonely Korean-American boy’s passion for the Buffalo Sabres, interlinked narratives that jump historical and imaginary time zones with humor, sorrow and irreverence.
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Li is the author of eleven books, including 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 awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, a 2023 International Writer Award from the Royal Society of Literature, the 2021 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Benjamin H. Dank Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Asian American Literary Award for fiction, and others. She is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, an independent film directed by Wayne Wang and adapted by Li from her short story, was the winner of Golden Shell for best film, 55th San Sebastian International Film Festival. Li has directed the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton since 2022.
Park joined the creative writing faculty as a lecturer this fall. His first novel, Personal Days, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. He is a founding editor of The Believer and has worked in newspapers, publishing, and academia. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Born in Buffalo, he lives in Manhattan with his family.
