Yiyun Li: "Placeholder and Serendipity"

On March 31, April 7, and April 14, internationally acclaimed writer Yiyun Li delivered the 2026 Berlin Lectures. The three lectures investigated 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 discusses her eclectic reading practice and her life experience as an exploration of how to stay enchanted with a muddled and disenchanting world.

March 31: Lecture I - "Three Lives; Two Exiles; One Question"

April 7: Lecture II - "Precision and Clarity in the Time of Uncertainty"

April 14: Lecture III - "Placeholder and Serendipity"

Ahead of the series, Li spoke with us about writing as a form of inquiry, literary genealogy and the relationship between science and literature.

Your fiction and essays often treat writing not just as storytelling but as a way of thinking through experience. In a 2023 New Yorker piece, you amend a sentence midstream: “Fiction, one suspects, is often tamer than life. Some fiction is tamer than some life, I should amend.” That moment of self-revision seems to recompose a thought as it appears. Does writing function for you as a kind of inquiry?

This self-revision is how I write and how I think. Any time I make a statement, either to myself in writing, to my students in the classroom, or to a friend on the phone, my intuition is to reexamine that statement at once, to make sure I have not misstepped on many possible fronts: word choice, the inner logic between one sentence and the next, and information.

In writing, to come up with a thought is not difficult. It’s more important to think through things, to make that thought as precise as possible. This ongoing inquiry is what brings me joy in writing.

Across your work, you often read alongside earlier writers (Marianne Moore, Stefan Zwieg, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor). How do you think about building your own literary conversation through the writers you return to?

In one of my stories, “Wednesday’s Child,” the protagonist observes: “She wished that nature had installed a different system for people to choose their genealogy—not by their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents but by the books they read, a genealogy that could be deliberately, purposefully, and revocably created and maintained.”

My conversation with writers past and present is to create a genealogy for my mind. It’s always an ongoing process, subject to revision and reimagination.

“Science and literature are, to me, explorations that are driven by what we don’t know.”
—Yiyun Li

You’ve spoken about your early training in science and mathematics. How do you think about the relationship between scientific thinking and literary thinking? What might each field learn from each other?

This is a topic that I shall elaborate further in my lectures. I believe strongly that my scientific training has defined me as a writer. Science and literature are, to me, explorations that are driven by what we don’t know. In science as well as in literature, one can never say one knows a hundred percent about one’s subject, whether it’s a signal channel between B and T lymphocytes or a character’s relationship with her past.

One can only say: by researching or by writing, I have come to know this subject a little better than when I first set out.