Yiyun is the author of numerous books, including the essay collection Dear Friend: from My Life I Write to You in Your Life and the internationally acclaimed A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and a California Book Award. In 2010, Yiyun was named a MacArthur Fellow, and now teaches creative writing at Princeton University.

“Like Ha Jin, this child of Communist China writes in English, initially for a Western audience; like Jin, too, she brings into our midst and language a sensibility and aesthetic that are plain, unblinking and at once haunted and supported by the ghosts of ancient stories,” the New York Times wrote about Yiyun’s work.  “There is no doubting that she is bringing her unimaginably alien experience into ours, if only to remind us that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”