Yiyun Li won Frank O'Connor Short Story Award

Yiyun Li received the largest short story prize in the world, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for her debut collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers illuminates how mythology, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose. "Immortality," winner of The Paris Review Plimpton Prize, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In "Extra," the friendship between a lonely Chinese woman and a young boy reveals how love can overcome political and personal repression. In "The Princess of Nebraska," a man and a woman, both in exile, met at a Chicago restaurant and reminisced about a young actor they had both been in love in Beijing. "After A Life" illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding a story of a couple who keeps a daughter hidden from the world for twenty-eight years. These and other stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.

Yiyun Li was born in Beijing, China. She came to America in 1996 with a limited command of English and started writing in English in 1998.

I've just got this:


Cork 2005-- European Capital of Culture

EDITORS'NOTES: FRANK O'CONNOR INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD 2005

WINNING AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996.  She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and her stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons.

ABOUT THE WINNING BOOK
"A beautifully executed debut collection of 10 stories explores the ravages of the Cultural Revolution on modern Chinese, both in China and America... Li deftly weaves a political message into her human portrait.... These are powerful stories that encapsulate tidily epic grief and longing."
Publishers Weekly, starred review

"With great tenderness, tact, and humour, these stories open a world that is culturally remote from us, and at the same time as humanly intimate as if its people were our own family and their thoughts the thoughts that lie nearest our own hearts."
Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead and Housekeeping

"Yiyun Li is a true storyteller. Great stories offer us the details of life on the river-banks: birth, family, dinner, and love, all framing the powerful flow of terror, death, political change, the river itself.  A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS is as grand an epic and as tenderly private as a reader could wish."
Amy Bloom, author of Come To Me



A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS by YIYUN LI
"The house of Mr. and Mrs. Pang is the place where I can take a break from being someone's daughter.  The days spent there, one summer week and one winter week, are the only time when I am not living under my schoolteacher mother.  Being someone's child is a difficult job, a position one has no right to quit.  Heaven forgive every child who dreams of being an orphan while her parents are working with backs bent to make the child's life a happy one. No life seems happier than an orphan's life for a non-orphan like me."

So begins "Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way", one of ten stories in Yiyun Li's luminous debut collection A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS (Random House; On sale September 20, 2005).  If you haven't yet discovered Li's fiction (her stories have been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares and Glimmer Train) here's your chance. She writes with honesty and fervour; the worlds she explores resonate and you are at once involved in the lives of her characters.  

Li illuminates how mythology, history and culture intersect with personality to create fate. In "After a Life," the unshareable pain a couple experiences in having a child with severe disabilities mirrors the unfaithfulness of their friend to his wife. In "Love in the Marketplace" a love-lost woman bearing the social stigma of being unmarried, screens Casablanca to her students, "Casablanca says all she wants to teach students about life," and finds comfort in the ritual of cracking sunflower seeds.  Her beliefs are put to the test when a beggar asks the unthinkable.  In "Extra," Granny Lin, cast off by society and considered old at the age of 51, begins work as a maid at an elite boarding school in China. She befriends a 6-year-old boy named Kang and while stuck at school each weekend, the two spend their hours roaming the grounds.  A heartbreaking misunderstanding awaits the two and Li writes, "the happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness followed." Raising issues of class, politics, family, and infidelity, A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS will leave you reflecting on your own life.

A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS; by Yiyun Li; Random House;
Publication date: September 27, 2005; ISBN: 1-4000-6312-4; $21.95

【大紀元9月30日訊】綜合自由時報編譯◎羅珊珊 8月底誕生的英國國家短篇小說獎（National Short Story Prize )，以首獎的一萬五千英鎊號稱史上短篇小說的最高獎金；不過，這個紀錄馬上就被打破了，剛剛揭曉的第一屆法蘭克．歐康納國際短篇小說獎（Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award )，獎金五萬英鎊（約合台幣兩百九十三萬 )，並且令人驚訝地，由只有四年寫作經驗的華裔女作家李翊雲摘下桂冠。

評審團主席薇兒．麥德米得（Val McDermid )，盛讚得獎者李翊雲，表示「這篇〈千年虔禱〉（A Thousand Years of Good Prayers )是短篇小說形式的極佳示範，通篇閃爍著非凡的靈光，它映照歷史，也反射人性。」

在北京長大的李翊雲，1996年到美國愛荷華，原本原本打算攻讀生物學博士學位，誤打誤撞參與了「愛荷華作家寫作班」，發現了自己對寫作的濃厚興趣，之後便開始在《紐約客》和《巴黎評論》上發表小說。

此獎乃向愛爾蘭知名作家法蘭克．歐康納（Frank O'Connor，1903～1966 )致敬，歐康納是劇作家、劇場導演暨文學評論家，而他的小說更以對愛爾蘭斯土生活的寫實描寫著稱。法蘭克．歐康納國際短篇小說獎由歐弗林建設贊助（O'Flynn )，也是由蒙斯特文學中心（Munster Literature Centre )主導的寇克市文學計劃（Cork's literary programme )的一部分。預計兩年舉辦一次，希望能提升以往不受重視的短篇小說之文學地位。