By Rivky Mondal

Photo Credit Hannah Yoon

Internationally renowned novelist and essayist Yiyun Li has become known for writing that probes life’s hardest realities. 

Li, a recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, writes about loss and cruelty with measured clarity, focusing less on devastating events themselves than on the complex, shifting ways people account for them. 

On March 31, April 7 and April 14, Li will deliver the 2026 Berlin Family Lectures, a series hosted annually by the University of Chicago’s Division of the Arts and Humanities. 

Her three-part series, titled “Placeholder and Serendipity: Notes on Reading Literature in 2026,” will offer a meditation on literature as a space not for answers but for thinking, and why such a space matters in times of overwhelming uncertainty.

All lectures will be held in person at the David Rubenstein Forum, and virtually, at 6pm CDT and include a Q&A with the audience. The series is free and open to all; registration is required and space is limited. 

Born and raised in Beijing, Li originally trained as a scientist, studying immunology before turning to literature after moving to the United States. She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, beginning a literary career that has since yielded celebrated novels, story collections and essays.

Her award-winning novels, which frequently explore themes of grief, loss and language, include The Book of Goose (2022), Where Reasons End (2019) and Kinder Than Solitude (2014). Her short fiction and essay collections—among them A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), winner of the Guardian First Book Award—trace episodes of displacement, memory and ethical choice. 

In her recent memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025), Li writes about gardening and grief after the suicide of her two sons. Whether writing about personal despair, political memory or the rhythms of the natural world, Li often focuses on how people continue living amid unpredictability, where meaning and understanding remain provisional. 

Rather than offer tidy moral lessons or familiar emotional arcs, her work treats reading and writing as a way of dwelling with difficult questions about love, loneliness and endurance.

Ahead of the series, Li spoke with us about writing as a form of inquiry, literary genealogy and the relationship between science and literature. 

Your fiction and essays often treat writing not just as storytelling but as a way of thinking through experience. In a 2023 New Yorker piece, you amend a sentence midstream: “Fiction, one suspects, is often tamer than life. Some fiction is tamer than some life, I should amend.” That moment of self-revision seems to recompose a thought as it appears. Does writing function for you as a kind of inquiry? 

This self-revision is how I write and how I think. Any time I make a statement, either to myself in writing, to my students in the classroom, or to a friend on the phone, my intuition is to reexamine that statement at once, to make sure I have not misstepped on many possible fronts: word choice, the inner logic between one sentence and the next, and information. 

In writing, to come up with a thought is not difficult. It’s more important to think through things, to make that thought as precise as possible. This ongoing inquiry is what brings me joy in writing.

Across your work, you often read alongside earlier writers (Marianne Moore, Stefan Zwieg, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor). How do you think about building your own literary conversation through the writers you return to?

In one of my stories, “Wednesday’s Child,” the protagonist observes: “She wished that nature had installed a different system for people to choose their genealogy—not by their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents but by the books they read, a genealogy that could be deliberately, purposefully, and revocably created and maintained.” 

My conversation with writers past and present is to create a genealogy for my mind. It’s always an ongoing process, subject to revision and reimagination.

“Science and literature are, to me, explorations that are driven by what we don’t know.”
—Yiyun Li

You’ve spoken about your early training in science and mathematics. How do you think about the relationship between scientific thinking and literary thinking? What might each field learn from each other?

This is a topic that I shall elaborate further in my lectures. I believe strongly that my scientific training has defined me as a writer. Science and literature are, to me, explorations that are driven by what we don’t know. In science as well as in literature, one can never say one knows a hundred percent about one’s subject, whether it’s a signal channel between B and T lymphocytes or a character’s relationship with her past. 

One can only say: by researching or by writing, I have come to know this subject a little better than when I first set out. 

The Berlin Family Lectures will take place March 31, April 7 and April 14 at the David Rubenstein Forum, 6-7:30 pm CDT, with audience Q&A following each talk. Register to attend in person or via Zoom.

Story originally posted on UChicago News.