Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara, born in 1974 in Los Angeles, is an American novelist, editor, and travel writer. She grew up moving often with her family, living in Hawaii, New York, Maryland, California, and Texas. Her father, Ronald Yanagihara, is a hematologist/oncologist from Hawaii, and her mother was born in Seoul. Through them, Yanagihara is of Japanese descent on her father’s side and Korean descent on her mother’s side. She attended Punahou School in Hawaii and graduated from Smith College in 1995.

Her career belongs to the contemporary American world of books, magazines, and culture writing. After college, Yanagihara moved to New York and worked for several years as a publicist. She later wrote for and edited at Condé Nast Traveler, bringing travel writing and editorial work into the same life as fiction. In 2015, she left Condé Nast to become a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. She became editor-in-chief of T in 2017 and announced stepping down in 2026.

Yanagihara’s first novel, The People in the Trees, was published in 2013 and was partly based on the real-life case of virologist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. The book was praised as one of the best novels of that year. Her second novel, A Little Life, was published on March 10, 2015, and became the work for which she is best known. It was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize for fiction and the 2016 Women’s Prize for Fiction, won the 2015 Kirkus Prize for fiction, and made Yanagihara a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction. The novel also defied expectations from her editor, her agent, and Yanagihara herself, who had not expected it to sell well.

A Little Life later moved from page to stage. A theatrical adaptation directed by Ivo van Hove premiered in Amsterdam in 2018 and later ran in London at the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2023. Yanagihara’s third novel, To Paradise, was published on January 11, 2022, and reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list. In 2025, A Little Life and To Paradise were included on a list of publications that “could harm the national interests of the Republic of Belarus” and were banned from distribution there.

Yanagihara has spoken about the reading that shaped her. As a girl, her father introduced her to Philip Roth and to “British writers of a certain age,” including Anita Brookner, Iris Murdoch, and Barbara Pym. Of Pym and Brookner, she said there was “a suspicion of the craft” in their work, “a metaphysical reckoning of what is it actually doing for the world.” She has also named Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, and John Banville among the contemporary writers she admires most. Her own career has kept that double attention in view: the private intensity of fiction, and the public discipline of editing. For readers, her words carry the force of a writer who has worked inside both solitude and the magazine desk, with a clear sense that books can unsettle expectations and still find a wide audience.