Hanya Yanagihara

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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]

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]

Following her graduation from Smith College in 1995,[2] 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 (19 March 2015). "Author Hanya Yanagihara's Not-So-Little Life". Newsweek. Retrieved 8 May 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. 12 August 2013. Retrieved 23 August 2016.
  4. ^ Development, PodBean. "Episode 30 - Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life - Part 3". Retrieved 13 October 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  5. ^ "Hanya Yanagihara: 'I wanted everything turned up a little too high'". The Guardian. July 26, 2015.
  6. ^ Kidd, James (5 January 2014). "Maverick in a Pacific Tempest: Hanya Yanagihara on being a first novel sensation". The Independent. Archived from the original on 2022-05-09. Retrieved 23 August 2016.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g Brockes, Emma (2018-04-22). "Hanya Yanagihara: influential magazine editor by day, best-selling author by night". the Guardian. Retrieved 2018-05-30.
  8. ^ a b "'I Wouldn'tve Had a Biography at All': The Millions Interviews Hanya Yanagihara - The Millions". The Millions. 2015-08-05. Retrieved 2018-05-31.
  9. ^ Sacks, Sam (6 March 2015). "Fiction Chronicle: Jude, the Obscure". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 17 July 2015.
  10. ^ "The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2015 shortlist is revealed". The Man Booker Prize. 15 September 2015. Archived from the original on 29 September 2015. Retrieved 20 September 2015.
  11. ^ "2015 Finalists | Kirkus Reviews". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved 2018-09-26.
  12. ^ Maloney, Jennifer (3 September 2015). "How 'A Little Life' Became a Sleeper Hit". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 17 July 2015.
  13. ^ "T Magazine's New Editor: From Glossies to Global Vision". The New York Times. 21 August 2017. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
  14. ^ Singh-Kurtz, Sangeeta (2021-04-14). "The Author of A Little Life Has a New Book". The Cut. Retrieved 2021-11-07.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  15. ^ "To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara". www.panmacmillan.com. Retrieved 2022-01-12.

External links[edit]

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