Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara was born in 1975 in Los Angeles. She and her family moved frequently, and as a child, she lived in various places throughout the United States, including New York and Hawaii. Her father was a hematologist and oncologist who introduced Yanagihara to the works of Philip Roth, Iris Murdoch, and Barbara Pym. Yanagihara attended high school in Hawaii and went on to graduate from Smith College in 1995. From there, she moved to New York to work as a publicist. During this time, she also worked as a writer and editor for Conde Nast Traveler. She published her first novel, The People in the Trees, in 2013. A Little Life followed in 2015 and was met with much critical success—it was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker prize for fiction, and it was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction. Following the success of A Little Life, Yanagihara accepted a position a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine, eventually becoming the magazine’s editor-in-chief in 2017. She published her third novel, To Paradise, in 2022.