Compelling book of a tumultuous decade
The year 2009 has been a year of good harvest for Chinese writers in terms of international recognition. Besides Su Tong who won the Man Asian Literary Award for The Boat to Redemption (河岸), Leslie T Chang bagged the Asian American literary award for Factory Girls and the poet Duo Duo received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Amid all this, Li Yiyun's Guardian First Book Award for her novel, The Vagrants, has gone relatively unnoticed.
Li - who stumbled into writing after attending a writers' workshop at Iowa, where she had gone to attend a PhD program in Immunology after graduating from Peking University, in 1996 - has been quietly picking up the awards ever since she began to get published. Her first collection of short stories - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, 2005 - won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction.
In 2007, she was included in the influential Granta Best of Young American Novelists anthology. Li is today easily one of the most prolific contributors to The New Yorker, writing essays, posts from her blog, personal history and fiction, it seems, with both hands.
