Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara (born 1974) is an American novelist, editor, and travel writer. She grew up in Hawaii. She is best known for her bestselling novel A Little Life (2015) and for being the Editor in Chief of T Magazine. After college, Yanagihara moved to New York and worked for several years as a publicist. She wrote and was an editor for Condé Nast Traveler. Her first novel, The People in the Trees, partly based on the real-life case of the virologist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, was praised as one of the best novels of 2013. Yanagihara's A Little Life was published in March 2015, and received widespread critical acclaim. The book was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize for fiction, and won the 2015 Kirkus Prize for fiction. Yanagihara was also selected as a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction. A Little Life defied the expectations of its editor, of Yanagihara's agent, and of the author herself, that it would not sell well