New Carnegie Medal winners Megha Majumdar and Yiyun Li love libraries

NEW YORK (AP) — Novelist Megha Majumdar, one of this year's winners of medals presented by the American Library Association, doesn't only visit libraries for the reading.

There's the jigsaw puzzle table in midtown Manhattan and the telescope she borrowed from the central branch of Brooklyn Public Library so she could have a closer look at the sky at night. And libraries, wherever the location, are an ideal place to get some writing done.

“I go often enough that my I have favorite places to sit,” she says.

The library association announced Tuesday that Majumdar has won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for “A Guardian and a Thief,” her story of a woman's troubled quest to leave India and join her husband in the United States. Yiyun Li was awarded in nonfiction for the memoir “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” in which she confronts the loss of her two sons, both of whom took their lives.

The authors each will receive $5,000 and be formally honored when the ALA gathers in June in Chicago.

“Megha Majumdar’s intoxicating novel is filled with emotion and relevance to all people and all places across time," Lillian Dabney, chair of the awards' selection committee, said in a statement. “Yiyun Li has courageously put almost inexplicable events into words that will benefit all who encounter her book.”

Previous winners of the Carnegie medals include Percival Everett, Jennifer Egan and Donna Tartt.

Li, 53, is the recipient of numerous literary honors, including the PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel “The Book of Goose” and The Guardian First Book Award for the story collection “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.” A native of Beijing who emigrated to attend the University of Iowa in 2000, Li says she never saw the inside of a library until middle school, when she was chosen to be a librarian's assistant, ”a monumental experience."

After moving to the U..S., she was dazzled, and educated, by the public library in Iowa City.

“I would walk to shelf to shelf,” she remembers. “That's how I discovered (British author) A.S. Byatt. There was a big collection of A.S. Byatt in the A's, so I started to read her. I read through the collections, from A to Z.”

Li now teaches at Princeton University, where she is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, a position first held by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. She gets writing done at the university library, and likes to visit the public library in town and “just look at the books and to look at the shelves — language books for immigrants and maps and travel books. I'm an old-fashioned person who likes to see the object.”

“In an alternative life, I could have been a librarian,” she says.

The 38-year-old Majumdar, like Li, is an immigrant who moved to the U.S. as a college student (Harvard University) and, from her first book, established herself as a major voice in contemporary literature. Her debut novel, “A Burning,” was a highly praised bestseller that came out in 2020. “A Guardian and a Thief” was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and National Book Award and a selection for Oprah Winfrey's book club.

Majumdar holds memories of libraries in India and the U.S. In her native Kolkata, one library was essentially a sidewalk display from which Majumdar borrowed “stacks” of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys novels. In Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband and son, she savors the chance for privacy and for community.

“It’s a very good feeling to be in a place which affirms that we are welcome there, we are part of the life of the city,” she says. “We can enjoy solitude and the company of our fellow city dwellers at once. We can pluck any book off the shelf and read for a bit, we can think and wander in our minds. And we do not have to buy anything to be there. That is rare, and energizing, and beautiful to me.”

This story has been corrected to note Yiyun Li's pivotal library experience was in Iowa City, not Ames, Iowa.