Wendy Law-Yone was born in Mandalay in 1947. At the age of 20 she was able to flee from her native country, which since 1962 had been subjected to military dictatorship. Law-Yone at first lived in South East Asia, i.e. Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, and later in the United States where she worked as a journalist. She describes the experience of exile in her novels The Coffin Tree (1983) and Irrawaddy Tango (1993). A scholarship she received from the University of East Anglia in 2002 brought Wendy Law-Yone to Great Britain. Since then she has been teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Her third novel, The Road to Wanting (2010) was nominated for the prestigious Organge Prize. Law-Yones works have been translated into Burmese, Danish, French, Hebrew, Italian, and Indian Marathi. For Wendy Law-Yone, the German language has a special significance: Before her flight from Burma, she was studying German. “I was surrounded by chaos,” the author remembers, “but the German language offered me structure.” In the years 2001 and 2012 Wendy Law-Yone returned each time for several months to her native country after over 30 years for exile to conduct research for her latest book: Golden Parasol. A Daughter’s Memoir of Burma (2013). The novel reconstructs the life of her father, the publisher of an influential newspaper forbidden during the dictatorship. Law-Yone uses her family’s history to reflect her country’s colonial and post-colonial history. In 2015, Golden Parasol became the first of her works published in Burmese, resulting in much attention in the local media. Next to civil rights advocate Aung San Suu Kyi, Wendy Law-Yone is regarded all over the world to be one of Burma’s most important voices.
