Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara | |
---|---|
![]() Hanya Yanagihara in 2016 | |
Born | 1975 (age 46–47) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
Occupation |
|
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Smith College |
Notable works | The 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]
- The People in the Trees, 2013
- A Little Life, 2015
- To Paradise, 2022
References[edit]
- ^ a b c d Nazaryan, Alexander (March 19, 2015). "Author Hanya Yanagihara's Not-So-Little Life". Newsweek. Retrieved May 8, 2015.
- ^ a b Hagan, Molly (February 2016). "Hanya Yanagihara". Current Biography. 77 (2): 91–95.
- ^ "Talking with Hanya Yanagihara About Her Debut Novel, The People in the Trees". Vogue. August 12, 2013. Retrieved August 23, 2016.
- ^ Development, PodBean. "Episode 30 - Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life - Part 3". Retrieved October 13, 2018.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ Adams, Tim (July 26, 2015). "Hanya Yanagihara: 'I wanted everything turned up a little too high'". The Observer.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Sacks, Sam (March 6, 2015). "Fiction Chronicle: Jude, the Obscure". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved July 17, 2015.
- ^ "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.
- ^ "2015 Finalists | Kirkus Reviews". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved September 26, 2018.
- ^ Maloney, Jennifer (September 3, 2015). "How 'A Little Life' Became a Sleeper Hit". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved July 17, 2015.
- ^ "T Magazine's New Editor: From Glossies to Global Vision". The New York Times. August 21, 2017. Retrieved April 27, 2018.
- ^ 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) - ^ "To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara". www.panmacmillan.com. Retrieved January 12, 2022.
External links[edit]


- Interview on Meet The Writers with Georgina Godwin at Soundcloud
- 21st-century American women writers
- 21st-century American non-fiction writers
- 21st-century American novelists
- American women novelists
- American women travel writers
- American travel writers
- American magazine writers
- American magazine editors
- American women editors
- American novelists of Asian descent
- American writers of Japanese descent
- American writers of Korean descent
- American women writers of Asian descent
- Novelists from Hawaii
- Writers from New York City
- Kirkus Prize winners
- Punahou School alumni
- Smith College alumni
- Living people
- 1975 births