By Wendy Greenberg

Princeton University Professor Yiyun Li has won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography for her memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow. But that has not been her only recent honor.

Time magazine included her in its list of the “100 Most Influential People of 2026.” No less than renowned writer Salman Rushdie wrote a citation in Time, calling her “a writer of exceptional gifts,” and disclosing that he is “in awe” of Things in Nature Merely Grow, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Li is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities and a professor of creative writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts.

The Pulitzer Prize citation called Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2025) “a writer’s deeply moving and revelatory account of losing her younger son to suicide a little more than six years after her older son died in the same manner, an austere and defiant memoir of acceptance that focuses on facts, language, and the persistence of life.”

The Pulitzer website quotes the book’s opening: “There is no good way to say this,” Li writes. “There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged…” explaining that she and her husband lost son Vincent in 2017, at age 16, and son James at age 19 in 2024. The Pulitzer web site calls the book “a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit” and describes it as the author’s “remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.”

Much of what Li writes about in the book happened in or near Princeton. “I’m particularly grateful to many in the Princeton community for their support and kindness in the past few years,” she said through a University spokesperson.

The book has received accolades since its publication. The New York Times called it “A memoir unlike others, strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away.” The memoir also was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. It was included in The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025, The New Yorker Best Books of 2025, and The Washington Post 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction from 2025, among many others.

“The book was written during a difficult time in my life about a tremendous loss,” Li is quoted in the University write-up, calling the Pulitzer a “bittersweet honor.”

Li was director of the Lewis Center’s Program in Creative Writing from 2022-2025. “We in the Lewis Center are thrilled, though not surprised, by the news of Yiyun’s Pulitzer,” said Judith Hamera, chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts, through the University. “This book is an especially powerful example of her extraordinary work in multiple genres: unsparing, elegant and generous, rendering life-altering events with precision, evocativeness that makes the reader gasp, humor, and beauty.”

At Princeton, Hamera said, “Her courses are legendary, especially for their demand that students pay rigorous attention — to language, to their walks to class, to each other, to the intricacies of good writing, and to what writing a thoughtful sentence can do to shift one’s world.”

Li is the author of 12 books, including Wednesday’s Child, a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; The Book of Goose; Where Reasons End; and Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages and she is the recipient of many honors and awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, among many others.

Li grew up in Beijing and earned a bachelor’s degree in cell biology from Peking University. She came to the U.S. to study immunology at the University of Iowa. After taking a writing class, she decided to earn an M.F.A. in fiction writing and an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2017.

Three Princeton faculty members were Pulitzer Prize finalists this year: Vinson Cunningham, for criticism; Kevin Sack, for nonfiction; and Patricia Smith, for poetry.

Many Princeton faculty and alumni are past Pulitzer Prize winners including Jeffrey Eugenides, John McPhee, Toni Morrison, Paul Muldoon, Tracy K. Smith, Paul Starr, and C.K. Williams. Eliza Griswold, who leads the Program in Journalism at Princeton, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for her book Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America.

In the broader literary community, Li was a judge of the Booker International Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. She is a contributing editor to the literary journal A Public Space, where, at the start of the pandemic, she initiated a virtual shared reading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in which thousands of people worldwide participated. The project culminated in the book Tolstoy Together, 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li.