Interview With E. Lily Yu, Winner of the 2017 LaSalle Artist Trust Storyteller Award

I am very pleased to announce that E. Lily Yu is the recipient of the 2017 Gar LaSalle Artist Trust StoryTeller Award. Lily’s lyrical, poetic, delightful prose lilts with fresh metaphors, framed within an atypical context. Her primary submission sample, The View From the Top of the Stair, has been published in Hazlitt. More about Lily at: http://elilyyu.com.

Lily was kind enough to talk with me about her writing and her world, and even read us a selection of her award-winning work. I guarantee it will be the most magical half an hour of your week.

Gar LaSalle Interviews E. Lily Yu

E. Lily Yu is an author and narrative designer born in the Pacific Northwest and raised in New Jersey. She was chosen for the NJ Governor’s School of the Arts in the summer of 2007, attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference as a Scholar in 2012, and attended Seattle’s Clarion West on a scholarship in 2013. Her stories have appeared in places like McSweeney’s, Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, Hazlitt, Uncanny, and F&SF, as well as multiple best-of-the-year collections, and have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. She received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2012. Video games she has worked on include Destiny and Destiny 2.


I am delighted to be able to recognize and support Lily’s work. Storytelling is both precious and powerful, and it helps to define us to ourselves as human. It is an honor to be part of the Seattle community supporting strong writing in the state of Washington.

Read the full press release from Artist Trust about the award here.

To learn why I created the Storyteller Award, click here.