Princeton professor Yiyun Li has won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for memoir for her 2025 book, “Things in Nature Merely Grow.”
Li is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities and a professor of creative writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts. She was at home in Princeton yesterday afternoon when her phone started to light up with congratulatory text messages from friends and colleagues. “My editor [Mitzi Angel] called at 3:25 p.m.,” she said. “I was overwhelmed and shocked.”
The Pulitzer Prize for memoir recognizes “a distinguished and factual memoir or autobiography by an American author.” The Pulitzer citation called “Things in Nature Merely Grow” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2025) “a writer’s deeply moving and revelatory account of losing her younger son to suicide a little more than six years after her older son died in the same manner, an austere and defiant memoir of acceptance that focuses on facts, language and the persistence of life.”
“The book was written during a difficult time in my life about a tremendous loss,” Li said, calling the Pulitzer a “bittersweet honor.”
“The book was written because I hold my faith in language, in thinking, and in carrying on, despite the difficulties,” she said, adding that the prize to her confirms “all these beliefs — in words, in language, in thinking through things.”
“Things in Nature Merely Grow” also won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfictionand the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. It was included in The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025, The New Yorker Best Books of 2025, and The Washington Post 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction from 2025, among many others.
“We in the Lewis Center are thrilled, though not surprised, by the news of Yiyun’s Pulitzer,” said Judith Hamera, chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. “This book is an especially powerful example of her extraordinary work in multiple genres: unsparing, elegant and generous, rendering life-altering events with precision, evocativeness that makes the reader gasp, humor, and beauty.”
At Princeton, Hamera said, “Her courses are legendary, especially for their demand that students pay rigorous attention — to language, to their walks to class, to each other, to the intricacies of good writing, and to what writing a thoughtful sentence can do to shift one’s world.”
Li is the author of 12 books, including “Wednesday’s Child,” a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; “The Book of Goose”; “Where Reasons End”; “Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life”; and “Tolstoy Together, 85 Days of War and Peace With Yiyun Li.” Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages.
Li grew up in Beijing and earned a bachelor’s in cell biology from Peking University, then came to the United States to study immunology at the University of Iowa. After taking a writing class, she switched her focus, earning an M.F.A. in fiction writing and an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2017.
Her honors and awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Windham-Campbell Prize, a 2023 International Writers Award from the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2021 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among many others. Earlier this year, she was named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people.
This year’s Pulitzer winners also include Princeton alumna Natalie Obiko Pearson ’99, at Bloomberg, for illustrated reporting and commentary.
Three Princeton faculty members were Pulitzer finalists this year: Vinson Cunningham, for criticism; Kevin Sack, for nonfiction; and Patricia Smith, for poetry. Alumna Katie Kitamura ’99 was a finalist for fiction, and incoming 2026-27 Hodder Fellow Nazareth Hassan was a finalist for drama.
Other current, former and emeritus faculty members who received the Pulitzer Prize while at Princeton include Jeffrey Eugenides, John McPhee, Toni Morrison, Paul Muldoon, Tracy K. Smith, Paul Starr and C.K. Williams. Former faculty member Jhumpa Lahiri received her Pulitzer prior to teaching at Princeton.
Eliza Griswold, who leads the Program in Journalism at Princeton, won the the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for her book “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America.”
Caroline Shaw won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for music when she was a graduate student at the University. Marie-Rose Sheinerman of the Class of 2022 was part of a team of reporters at the Miami Herald awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting. Caroline Kitchener of the Class of 2014, writing for The Washington Post, was awarded a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
