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]

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]

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]

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][2]

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 she published her best selling sophomore novel, 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]

Yanagihara's third novel, To Paradise, was published on January 11, 2022, and reached number one on The New York Times best seller list.^[20][21]

• A Little Life: Winner of 2015 Kirkus Prize for Fiction^[17]
• A Little Life: Shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize^[3][6]
• A Little Life: Finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Fiction^[18]
• A Little Life: Shortlisted for the 2016 Women's Prize for Fiction^[6][16]
• A Little Life: Shortlisted for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award^[22]

• The People in the Trees, 2013
• A Little Life, 2015
• To Paradise, 2022