Wendy Law-Yone
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Wendy Law-Yone | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 1, 1947[1] Mandalay, British Burma |
| Occupation | writer |
| Nationality | American |
| Spouse | John Randall |
| Children | Jocelyn Seagrave Sean Seagrave Chad O'Connor Bess O'Connor |
| Relatives | Edward Law-Yone (father) |
Wendy Law-Yone (Burmese pronunciation: [lɔ́ jòʊɰ̃]; 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).
The daughter of notable Burmese newspaper publisher, editor and politician Edward Michael Law-Yone,[2] Law-Yone was born in Mandalay but grew up in Rangoon.[3] Her background is diverse, with one grandfather a merchant from Yunnan and another a colonial officer from Great Britain.[4] Law-Yone states that she is "half Burman, a quarter Chinese and a quarter English".[5]
Law-Yone has indicated that her father's imprisonment under the military regime limited her options in the country. She was barred from university, but not allowed to leave the country.[5] In 1967, an attempt to escape to Thailand failed and she was imprisoned, but managed to leave Burma as a stateless person.[5] 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.[2] In 1987, she was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Award for Creative Writing.[6] In 2002, she received a David T.K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of East Anglia.[7] Her novel The Road to Wanting was long-listed for the Orange Prize 2011.[8] In 2015, she was Dürrenmatt guest professor at University of Bern, Switzerland.[9]
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.[10]
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)
