Things in Nature Merely Grow Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir 2026

Things in Nature Merely Grow is Yiyun Li’s deeply personal memoir about surviving the deaths by suicide of her two sons, Vincent and James, six years apart. Written with restraint, precision, and emotional honesty, the book does not offer easy consolation or a neat narrative of recovery. Instead, Li reflects on grief, motherhood, language, facts, memory, reading, and the difficult persistence of ordinary life after unbearable loss. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2025, it won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography; the Pulitzer board described it as an “austere and defiant memoir of acceptance” focused on facts, language, and the persistence of life.