Hanya Yanagihara

Although perennially restrained in its reviews, “Wall Street Journal” called her “ a leading American author.” With such credentials, and having been shortlisted for the most prestigious prizes (National Book Award, Man Booker Prize), Hanya Yanagihara arrives in Athens as a guest of the Onassis Stegi and the Onassis Foundation.

It just took two novels for Yanagihara to attract the attention of the US literary community. The first, “The People in the Trees”, was among the best publications of 2013, while two years later came “A Little Life”, which secured her position among the elite American novelists.

The daughter of a haematologist-oncologist and a fourth generation resident of Hawaii, Hanya Yanagihara was born in Los Angeles and grew up in various cities, following her father in his meanderings. A graduate of Smith College in Massachusetts, which she chose because it was Silvia Plath’s alma mater, she started exploring her writing prowess as a journalist. She now lives in New York, where she still works for the New York Times T magazine, despite her growing authorial fame.

Her initial contact with art was through painting, when she started making portraits at an early age, drawing inspiration from the most unlikely place for a child: the morgue. Her father had provided her with access to the hospital where he was working at the time, to encourage her study of the human body.

So, it is in no way accidental that both her books draw their material from incidents of molestation. In “The People in the Trees”, Yanagihara tells the story of an eminent anthropologist who at the end of his career is accused of raping four young boys, while in “A Little Life”, she chronicles the coming of age of four friends, one of whom, by now an acclaimed New York attorney, was sexually abused as a child.

It took her 18 years to complete her first book and just 18 months for the second. “Life is short as a whole,” observes the 40-year-old writer and it is this very life that she captures in her books with such exceptional candour.