Windham-Campbell Prize Ceremony and Lecture by Yiyun Li

Join us for a joyful celebration of the recipient 2026 Windham-Campbell Prizes for drama, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, capped off with the annual Windham-Campbell Lecture, which will be delivered by 2020 Windham-Campbell fiction recipient, Yiyun Li. The theme, Why I Write, is also the title of our book series with Yale University Press, which features expanded versions of these lectures.

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 and Andrew Carnegie Medal and was a finalist for National Book Award and PEN/Jean Stein award. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Windham-Campbell Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Faulkner Award, PEN/Jean Stein Award, and an International Writer Award from the Royal Society of Literature. A new novel, Music Against the Night, will be published in October 2026. Li is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.