Laurence Michael Yep (Chinese pinyin: Yè Xiángtiān; born June 14, 1948) is a prolific, award-winning Chinese-American modern author. Born in San Francisco, California, he is the youngest child of his family. Growing up, he often felt torn between both American and Chinese culture, and expressed this in many of his books. As it says in his autobiography, “I was too American to fit into Chinatown, and too Chinese to fit in anywhere else.” His first writing was done in high school, for a science fiction magazine. His teacher, a priest, told him and a couple of his friends that to get an A, they had to get a piece of writing accepted by a magazine, and that’s when he started to realize that a career in writing was meant to be.
Yep attended Marquette University and graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He earned a Ph.D in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
The most notable of his books is a series called the Golden Mountain Chronicles, which documents the story of the fictional Young family from 1849, in China, to 1995, in America. He has received the Newbery Honor for two books in the series, Dragon’s Gate and Dragonwings. The latter has been adapted into a play. Other notable books are the Dragon series and The Chinatown Mysteries. He was awarded the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal in 2005 for his contributions to children’s literature.
Yep is married to fellow author Joanne Ryder and lives in Pacific Grove, California.
A live-action/CGI TV movie of ‘’The Tiger’s Apprentice’’, adapted by ‘’Finding Neverland’’ writer David Magee, is currently being developed by Cartoon Network.