Yiyun Li: Language After Loss

Internationally acclaimed author Yiyun Li joins us for an extraordinary live-streamed event to discuss her luminous new memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, a work of rare courage and beauty, written in the wake of the deaths of both her teenage sons.

Tender yet unflinching, it weaves grief, geometry, music and motherhood into a profound meditation on endurance and the fragile, transformative power of words. The book has already been longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2025, marking it out as one of the most significant works of the year.

Li is the author of eleven books, including the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the Guardian First Book Award-winning The Vagrants, and the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Where Reasons End. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages, she is a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant, and she currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University.

This rare conversation offers the chance to hear from one of the most celebrated literary voices of our time as she reflects on survival, meaning and the act of writing itself.

You may also like the following events from Creative Folkestone:

• This Saturday, 27th September, 11:00 am, Animated Labyrinth Beasts with Young Animators in Folkestone
• Next Saturday, 4th October, 11:00 am, Woven Landscapes with Helen Coyston in Folkestone
• Next month, 11th October, 11:00 am, Making Mini Beasts with Nicole Cowan in Folkestone

Also check out other Arts events in Folkestone, Literary Art events in Folkestone, Health & Wellness events in Folkestone.