Hanya Yanagihara

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara in 2016
Hanya Yanagihara in 2016
Born1975 (age 46–47)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation
  • Author
  • writer
  • journalist
NationalityAmerican
Alma materSmith College
Notable worksThe People in the Trees (2013)
A Little Life (2015)
To Paradise (2022)

Hanya Yanagihara (born 1975) is an American novelist, editor and travel writer. She grew up in Hawaii.[1]

Early life[edit]

Hanya Yanagihara was born in 1975 in Los Angeles.[2] Her father, hematologist/oncologist[1] Ronald Yanagihara, is from Hawaii, and her mother was born in Seoul.[3] Yanagihara is partly of Japanese descent through her father.[4] As a child, Yanagihara moved frequently with her family, living in Hawaii, New York, Maryland, California and Texas.[5] She attended Punahou High School in Hawaii.[6] She attended Smith College and graduated in 1995.[2]

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.[7] 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".[7] She has said that "the contemporary writers I admire most are Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, and John Banville".[8]

Career[edit]

After college, Yanagihara moved to New York and worked for several years as a publicist.[1] She wrote and was an editor for Condé Nast Traveler.[7]

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.[1]

Yanagihara's A Little Life was published in March 2015, and received widespread critical acclaim.[9] The book was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize for fiction,[10] and won the 2015 Kirkus Prize for fiction.[11] 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.[12]

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".[8]

In 2015, she left Condé Nast to become a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine.[7] 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.[7] 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'".[7] Of working as an editor while writing fiction on the side, she says, "I've never done it any other way".[7] In 2017, she became the editor-in-chief of T.[13]

Yanagihara's third novel, To Paradise, was published in January 2022.[14][15]

Works and publications[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d Nazaryan, Alexander (March 19, 2015). "Author Hanya Yanagihara's Not-So-Little Life". Newsweek. Retrieved May 8, 2015.
  2. ^ a b Hagan, Molly (February 2016). "Hanya Yanagihara". Current Biography. 77 (2): 91–95.
  3. ^ "Talking with Hanya Yanagihara About Her Debut Novel, The People in the Trees". Vogue. August 12, 2013. Retrieved August 23, 2016.
  4. ^ Development, PodBean. "Episode 30 - Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life - Part 3". Retrieved October 13, 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  5. ^ Adams, Tim (July 26, 2015). "Hanya Yanagihara: 'I wanted everything turned up a little too high'". The Observer.
  6. ^ Kidd, James (January 5, 2014). "Maverick in a Pacific Tempest: Hanya Yanagihara on being a first novel sensation". The Independent. Archived from the original on May 9, 2022. Retrieved August 23, 2016.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g Brockes, Emma (April 22, 2018). "Hanya Yanagihara: influential magazine editor by day, best-selling author by night". The Guardian. Retrieved May 30, 2018.
  8. ^ a b Masad, Ilana (August 5, 2015). "'I Wouldn'tve Had a Biography at All': The Millions Interviews Hanya Yanagihara". The Millions. Retrieved May 31, 2018.
  9. ^ Sacks, Sam (March 6, 2015). "Fiction Chronicle: Jude, the Obscure". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved July 17, 2015.
  10. ^ "The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2015 shortlist is revealed". The Man Booker Prize. September 15, 2015. Archived from the original on September 29, 2015. Retrieved September 20, 2015.
  11. ^ "2015 Finalists | Kirkus Reviews". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved September 26, 2018.
  12. ^ Maloney, Jennifer (September 3, 2015). "How 'A Little Life' Became a Sleeper Hit". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved July 17, 2015.
  13. ^ "T Magazine's New Editor: From Glossies to Global Vision". The New York Times. August 21, 2017. Retrieved April 27, 2018.
  14. ^ Singh-Kurtz, Sangeeta (April 14, 2021). "The Author of A Little Life Has a New Book". The Cut. Retrieved November 7, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  15. ^ "To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara". www.panmacmillan.com. Retrieved January 12, 2022.

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Hanya Yanagihara.
Wikiquote has quotations related to Hanya Yanagihara.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hanya_Yanagihara&oldid=1102875834"