Hanya Yanagihara (born 1974)[1] is an American novelist, editor, and travel writer. She grew up in Hawaii.[2] She is best known for her bestselling novel A Little Life, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize, and for being the editor-in-chief of T Magazine.[3][4]
Early life
Hanya Yanagihara was born in 1974 in Los Angeles.[1] Her father, hematologist/oncologist[2] Ronald Yanagihara, is from Hawaii, and her mother was born in Seoul.[5] Yanagihara is partly of Japanese descent through her father and partly of Korean descent through her mother.[6][7] As a child, Yanagihara moved frequently with her family, living in Hawaii, New York, Maryland, California and Texas.[8] She attended the Punahou School in Hawaii[9] before graduating from Smith College in 1995.[10]
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.[11] 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".[11] She has said that "the contemporary writers I admire most are Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, and John Banville".[12]
Career
Hanya Yanagihara
After college, Yanagihara moved to New York and worked for several years as a publicist.[2] She wrote and was an editor for Condé Nast Traveler.[11]
Yanagihara's A Little Life was published on March 10, 2015, and received widespread critical acclaim.[13][14] The book was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize for fiction,[15] the 2016 Women's Prize for Fiction[6][16] and won the 2015 Kirkus Prize for fiction.[17] Yanagihara was also selected as a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction.[18]A Little Life defied the expectations of its editor, of Yanagihara's agent, and of the author herself, that it would not sell well.[19]
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".[12]
In 2015, she left Condé Nast to become a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. She has said that after her sophomore novel became a best seller, people in the publishing industry were baffled by her decision to take a job at T.[11] 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'". Of working as an editor while writing fiction on the side, she says, "I've never done it any other way".[11] In 2017, she became the editor-in-chief of T.[4]
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