About this program
The Windham-Campbell Lecture is a central feature of the annual Windham-Campbell Prize Festival and is delivered each year by a distinguished writer on the topic “Why I Write.” This year, Chinese-born writer Yiyun Li shares insights into her craft and creative process. The annual lectures are published in extended form by Yale University Press in its Why I Write series.
Livestream information coming soon.
Established in 2013 and administered by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Windham-Campbell Prize annually recognizes eight English language writers from around the world. (Click here to read about this year's recipients.) The mission of the award is to call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work.
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Image credit: Hannah Yoon
About the author
Born in Beijing, China, Yiyun Li is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the most recent, Things in Nature Merely Grow, which won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for memoir and the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and PEN/Jean Stein award. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Windham-Campbell Prize in 2020, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Faulkner Award, Pen/Jean Stein Award, an International Writer Award from the Royal Society of Literature, among others, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2024. A new novel, Music Against the Night, will be published in October 2026. Li is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in Humanities at Princeton University.
