2026 Berlin Family Lectures: Yiyun Li
Placeholder and Serendipity:
Notes on Reading Literature in 2026
March 31: Lecture I
- "Three Lives; Two Exiles; One Question"
April 7: Lecture II (Book signing to follow)
- "Precision and Clarity in the Time of Uncertainty "
April 14: Lecture III
- "Placeholder and Serendipity"
All Lectures are 6–7:30 p.m. (CDT), and will include a Q&A session where the audience will be in dialogue with Yiyun Li.
David Rubenstein Forum, Friedman Hall
1201 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
In an essay on gardening for The New Yorker magazine, Yiyun Li writes: “A rose is never an argument. There is no such thing as an angry rose or a moping rose or an empowered rose; only a realistic rose, a matter-of-fact rose, a transient rose. Each flower in my garden holds some concrete space, a physical one as well as a temporal one. A flower, like a thought, a sentence, a book, is but a placeholder.”
Serendipity was a word created by Horace Walpole. He took the Persian word for Sri Lanka—Serendip, and formed the word serendipity upon the fairytale The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
The three lectures in this year’s Berlin Family Lectures will investigate two less-discussed roles of literature: as a placeholder and as a place where discoveries happen by serendipity. During a contentious time when humanistic values often feel as though besieged, and life is increasingly driven by quests and outcomes, Li hopes to bring her eclectic reading practice and her life experience into an exploration of how to stay enchanted with a muddled and disenchanting world.
More about Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the most recent, Things in Nature Merely Grow, which won the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal and was a finalist for National Book Award and PEN/Jean Stein award. She is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, PEN/Jean Stein Award, an International Writer Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and many other places. A member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Li is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.
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About the Berlin Family Lectures
Inaugurated in 2014 with a gift from Randy and Melvin Berlin, the Berlin Family Lectures brings to campus leading scholars, writers, and creative artists from around the world. Each academic year, the visitor delivers an extended series of lectures, participates in the university’s intellectual community, and develops a book for publication with the University of Chicago Press.