Sweet Briar College’s International Writers Series continues Wednesday and Thursday, Oct. 8 and 9 with Yiyun Li, author of the award-winning short story collection “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.”

Yiyun LiLi, who won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the California Book Award for first fiction, will lecture on Oct. 8 and read from her most recent work on Oct. 9. Both events begin at 8 p.m. in Memorial Chapel and admission is free.

Li’s latest work is “The Vagrants,” a novel to be published by Random House in February 2009. Set in Li’s homeland of China, it is the story of a community’s reaction to the executions of two political prisoners.

Although fictional, the tale grew out of a story that Li, now 35, heard as a child in Beijing. “There was a case in China in the late seventies about a political prisoner being executed that sparked this protest,” she said. “I took those two executions from history but the rest of the novel all came from my imagination.”

Li’s stories often take inspiration from her life in China, a country she left in 1996 to pursue a graduate degree in immunology at the University of Iowa. While the situations she writes about might contain a grain of truth, her characters are purely imaginary.

“I don’t like to write about people I know in life,” she said. “Your imagination is limited. I more or less take the situation out of real life. [For example,] my mother used to work in the really posh school in Beijing and there was a boy who used to steal girls’ socks. I like to take situations out of life and make up characters.”

In her review of “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” Marilynn Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Gilead” and “Housekeeping,” wrote, “… these stories open a world that is culturally removed from us, and at the same time as humanly intimate as if its people were our own family and their thoughts the thoughts that lie nearest our own hearts.”

Elizabeth McCracken, author of “The Giant House” and “Niagara Falls All Over Again,” called Li’s first book “more than wonderful” and “extraordinary,” adding, “She’ll make you laugh out loud, and then she’ll break your heart.”

Li earned a master’s in immunology from the University of Iowa and a master’s in creative writing from the highly regarded Iowa Writers Workshop. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, Calif., with her husband and two sons.

Following Li in the International Writers Series will be Spanish writer Luis Goytisolo. He will lecture and read from his work, in Spanish, at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 16. The free event will be held in the Browsing Room of Mary Helen Cochran Library.

For more information on upcoming writers series events, contact John Gregory Brown, director of SBC’s creative writing program, at brown@sbc.edu or (434) 381-6434, or visit the International Writers Series Web site.

– By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer