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==