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Hanya Yanagihara

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Hanya Yanagihara
BornHanya K Yanagihara
(1974-09-20) September 20, 1974 (age 49)
Los Angeles, California[1]
OccupationAuthor, writer, journalist
NationalityAmerican
Alma materSmith College[2]
Notable worksA Little Life (2015)
The People in The Trees (2013)

Hanya Yanagihara (born September 20, 1974)[3] is an American novelist and travel writer of Hawaiian ancestry.[4]

Early life

Yanagihara was born in Los Angeles, California, a fourth-generation Hawaiian, to a father who was a hematologist/oncologist,[4] Richard Yanagihara,[5] from Hawaii and a mother who was born in Seoul. She frequently moved around the United States as a child, due to her father's occupation. The family lived in multiple locations, including Hawaii, New York City, Baltimore, Maryland, California, and Texas.[6]

She attended Punahou High School in Hawaii.[7]

Career

Following her graduation from the women's college Smith College in 1995, Yanagihara moved to New York and worked for several years as a publicist.[4] In 2007, Yanagihara began writing for Condé Nast Traveler where she became an editor before leaving in 2015 to become a deputy editor at the style magazine T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Her first novel, The People in the Trees, 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, again receiving predominantly favorable reviews,[8] and defying expectations by its editor, Yanagihara's agent, and the author herself that it would not sell well.[9] One notable exception was Daniel Mendelsohn for the New York Review of Books, who sharply critiqued A Little Life's technical execution, its depictions of violence, which Mendelsohn found ethically and aesthetically gratuitous, and its position with respect to the representation of queer life or issues by a presumed-heterosexual author.[10] Mendelsohn's review prompted a response from Gerald Howard, the book's publisher, in a letter to which Mendelsohn responded in turn.[11][12] On September 15, 2015, the book was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize for fiction.[13] Yanagihara was also selected as a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction for A Little Life.

Works and publications

References

  1. ^ "Hanya Yanagihara | The Man Booker Prizes". themanbookerprize.com. Retrieved 2016-02-21.
  2. ^ "WordSmith « - Smith College Office of Alumnae Relations Smith College Office of Alumnae Relations". alumnae.smith.edu. Retrieved 2016-02-21.
  3. ^ "Hanya K Yanagihara - California Birth Index". FamilySearch. 20 September 1974. Retrieved 23 August 2016.
  4. ^ a b c d Nazaryan, Alexander (19 March 2015). "Author Hanya Yanagihara's Not-So-Little Life". Newsweek. Retrieved 8 May 2015.
  5. ^ "Talking with Hanya Yanagihara About Her Debut Novel, The People in the Trees". Vogue. 12 August 2013. Retrieved 23 August 2016.
  6. ^ "Hanya Yanagihara: 'I wanted everything turned up a little too high'". The Guardian. July 26, 2015. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  7. ^ Kidd, James (5 January 2014). "Maverick in a Pacific Tempest: Hanya Yanagihara on being a". The Independent. Retrieved 23 August 2016.
  8. ^ Sacks, Sam (6 March 2015). "Fiction Chronicle: Jude the Obscure". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 17 July 2015.
  9. ^ Maloney, Jennifer (3 September 2015). "How 'A Little Life' Became a Sleeper Hit". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 17 July 2015.
  10. ^ Mendelsohn, Daniel (3 December 2015). "A Striptease Among Pals". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 24 February 2016.
  11. ^ Howard, Gerald (17 December 2015). "Too Hard to Take". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 24 February 2016.
  12. ^ Alison, Flood (2 December 2015). "Debate erupts as Hanya Yanagihara's editor takes on critic over bad review of A Little Life". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 February 2016.
  13. ^ "The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2015 shortlist is revealed". The Man Booker Prize. 15 September 2015. Retrieved 20 September 2015.
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