Born in Los Angeles, Hanya Yanagihara spent her childhood between Hawaii, New York, Maryland, California and Texas. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, she settled in New York and worked in publishing before becoming a journalist and the editor for Condé Nast Traveler and subsequently the New York Times style supplement, T magazine.
Her debut novel The People in the Trees, published in 2013 to wide critical acclaim, draws from the true story of Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, who was later convicted of child abuse. Yanagihara’s second novel rocketed her into the literary scene: an enduring bestseller and a modern classic, A Little Life (2015) won the 2015 Kirkus Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her third novel, To Paradise (2022), spans three centuries and explores three alternate versions of America and the American experiment.
