Yiyun Li is the author of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Guardian First Book Award, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, an International Writer Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Things in Nature Merely Grow is the winner of the 2026 Carnegie Medal for Non-Fiction, and was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. Li is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.