Yiyun Li is first woman to win world’s richest short story award

Yiyun Li has won The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award for her story, A Sheltered Woman. She is the first woman to win the award since its inception in 2010.

A Sheltered Woman is the story of a Chinese-American nanny hired to spend a month and no more supporting a new mother and her baby; trying to keep detached from the emotional turmoil around her, she is also entrapped by her own past. A story of an outsider and the falseness of self-imposed isolation, it was first published in The New Yorker in March 2014.

Judge Elif Shafak said: “Amidst a diverse and dazzling shortlist, which made our job as jury members very, very difficult, the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li’s A Sheltered Woman has enchanted us with its exquisite crafting, brilliant observations and modest but powerful voice. It also gives me immense joy that with her beautiful story she has become the first woman to win the ‘short-form Booker’.”

The inspiration for the story lay in a seemingly trivial incident. Li said: “A couple years ago, while rummaging through old things, I found a notebook that I had bought at a garage sale in Iowa City when I first came to America – I had paid five cents for it. The notebook was in a good shape; though it remained unused. A character occurred to me: she paid a dime and asked if there was a second notebook so she did not have to have the change back. Such greed, the character said, laughing at herself. From that moment on I knew I had a story.”

42-year-old Li, who has been shortlisted before in 2011 for her story The Science of Flight, grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. Her novel The Vagrants was shortlisted for the Dublin Impac Award. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, her second collection, was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at University of California, Davis.

Film and theatre director Sir Richard Eyre presented Li with her cheque for £30,000 at a Gala dinner at the Stationers’ Hall on Friday, April 24th. He commented, “the quality of the entrants demonstrated that the short story is an extremely vigorous form”.

In a global contest Li beat off opposition from fellow Americans Elizabeth McCracken and Scott O’Connor, New Zealander Paula Morris, Canadian Madeleine Thien and Rebecca F John from Wales. The shortlisted authors each received £1,000.

Yiyun Li joins a prestigious line-up of international winners including fellow American author Adam Johnson, who won the award last year for his story Nirvana, Dominican-American Junot Díaz, whose story Miss Lora won in 2013, Irish author Kevin Barry (Beer Trip to Llandudno, 2012), American Anthony Doerr (The Deep, 2011), and New Zealander C K Stead who won the inaugural award in 2010 with Last Season’s Man.

[ A Sheltered Woman by Yiyun Li ]

[ Yiyun Li discusses her story with the New Yorker ]