Hanya Yanagihara

A fourth-generation resident of Hawaii, Yanagihara was born in Los Angeles, California. Her father, hematologist/oncologist[4] Ronald Yanagihara, is from Hawaii, and her mother was born in Seoul.[5] Yanagihara is partly of Japanese descent through her father.[6] As a child, Yanagihara moved frequently with her family, living in Hawaii, New York, Maryland, California, and Texas.[7] She attended Punahou High School in Hawaii.[8]

Yanagihara has said that her father introduced her as a girl to the work of Philip Roth and to "British writers of a certain age", such as Anita Brookner, Iris Murdoch, and Barbara Pym.[9] Of Pym and Brookner, she says, "there is a suspicion of the craft that the male writers of their generation didn't have, a metaphysical reckoning of what is it actually doing for the world".[9] She has said that "the contemporary writers I admire most are Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, and John Banville".[10]

Following her graduation from Smith College in 1995, Yanagihara moved to New York and worked for several years as a publicist.[4] She wrote and was an editor for Condé Nast Traveler.[9]

Her first novel, The People in the Trees, partly based on the real-life case of the virologist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, was praised as one of the best novels of 2013.[4]

Yanagihara's A Little Life was published in March 2015, and received widespread critical acclaim.[11] The book was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize for fiction,[12] and won the 2015 Kirkus Prize for fiction.[13] Yanagihara was also selected as a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction. A Little Life defied the expectations of its editor, of Yanagihara's agent, and of the author herself, that it would not sell well.[14]

Yanagihara described writing the book at its best as "glorious as surfing; it felt like being carried aloft on something I couldn't conjure but was lucky enough to have caught, if for just a moment. At its worst, I felt I was somehow losing my ownership over the book. It felt, oddly, like being one of those people who adopt a tiger or lion when the cat's a baby and cuddly and manageable, and then watch in dismay and awe when it turns on them as an adult".[10]

In 2015, she left Condé Nast to become a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine.[9] She has said that after she published the bestselling novel A Little Life, people in the publishing industry were baffled by her decision to take a job at T.[9] Describing the publishing world as "a provincial community, more or less as snobby as the fashion industry", she said, "I'd get these underhanded comments like, 'oh, I never knew there were words [in T Magazine] worth reading'".[9] Of working as an editor while writing fiction on the side, she says, "I've never done it any other way".[9] In 2017, she became the editor-in-chief of T.[15]

• The People in the Trees, 2013
• A Little Life, 2015
• To Paradise, 2022[16]

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