Wendy Law-Yone

Wendy Law-Yone (; born 1947) is the critically acclaimed Burmese-born American author of A Daughter's Memoir of Burma (Columbia University Press, 2014), Golden Parasol (Chatto & Windus, 2013), The Road to Wanting (Chatto & Windus, 2010), Irrawaddy Tango (Knopf, 1994), and The Coffin Tree (Knopf, 1983).

Biography The daughter of notable Burmese newspaper publisher, editor and politician Edward Michael Law-Yone, Her background is diverse, with one grandfather a merchant from Yunnan and another a colonial officer from Great Britain. Law-Yone states that she is "half Burman, a quarter Chinese and a quarter English". She relocated to the United States in 1973, attending Eckerd College for comparative literature and modern languages before receiving a Carnegie Fellowship and settling in Washington, D.C. for thirty years. In 1987, she was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Award for Creative Writing. In 2002, she received a David T.K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of East Anglia. Her novel The Road to Wanting was long-listed for the Orange Prize 2011. In 2015, she was Dürrenmatt guest professor at University of Bern, Switzerland.

Law-Yone cites as a strong influence on her writing career her father's love of language, noting that his work as the founder of Burmese English-language newspaper The Nation was a daily factor in her childhood.

Selected bibliography

The Coffin Tree (1983) Irrawaddy Tango (1993) The Road to Wanting (2010) Golden Parasol: A Daughter's Memoir of Burma (2013) Dürrenmatt and me. Eine Passage von Burma nach Bern (2021, German-English edition) Aung San Suu Kyi: Politician, Prisoner, Parent (2023)