Charles Yu

Charles Chowkai Yu was born in 1976 in Los Angeles to Taiwanese immigrant parents. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, earning a BS in Molecular and Cell Biology and minoring in creative writing. In addition to Interior Chinatown, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, Yu has written a novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010), and two collections of short stories. He served as a story editor for 10 episodes of the HBO series Westworld and co-wrote an episode for the show, and in 2017 he was nominated for two Writers Guild of America awards for his work on the show. Yu’s essays, book reviews, and other writing have appeared in The Atlantic and Slate, among other notable online and print publications. Yu was named a “5 under 35” honoree by the National Book Foundation by Richard Powers in 2007. He currently lives near Irvine, California with his wife and their two children.