Hanya Yanagihara

Hear from Hanya Yanagihara – a writer whose fictional worlds hold readers in thrall, long after the final page – in conversation with Jason Steger about art, extremity and the language of friendship.

Jason Steger and Hanya Yanagihara – on stage at Melbourne's Athenaeum Theatre, for the Wheeler Centre — Photo: Jon Tjhia

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.

‘How much monstrousness are you allowed to get away with in the name of art? I think this book says: not much.’

Hanya Yanagihara

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.’

What’d you think?

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