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Hanya Yanagihara

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Over the course of two very different novels, Hanya Yanagihara has established herself as a formidable and versatile new literary voice.

Her debut, 2013’s The People in the Trees, had Yanagihara leading readers to a fictional Micronesian island nation, and to a turtle with life-giving flesh, weaving a magical premise into an examination of moral failure and ecological abuse.

Then, there was last year’s critically celebrated A Little Life – the Man Booker and National Book Award shortlisted novel that one New Yorker critic warned could ‘drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life’. That book, at turns harrowing and heartening, performed a complex balancing act: offering both a tribute to male adult friendship and a deep consideration of the toll of childhood trauma across many years.

Yanagihara’s linguistic versatility extends beyond the confines of the novel – she’s also a travel writer, and deputy editor of the New York Times’ style magazine, T.

Of writing A Little Life, Yanagihara has said that the novel became ‘more real than life itself. That process … is absorbing and dangerous.’ Hear from a writer who is certain to surprise and challenge – and whose fictional worlds hold readers in thrall, long after the final page.

In conversation with Jason Steger.

Featuring

Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara is the author of A Little Life and The People in the Trees. She is deputy editor at the New York Times T Magazine, and lives in New York City.

Jason Steger

Jason Steger is books editor at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Location

Athenaeum Theatre

188 Collins Street Melbourne Victoria 3000

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The Wheeler Centre acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Centre stands. We acknowledge and pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their Elders, past and present, as the custodians of the world’s oldest continuous living culture.