Vyvyane Loh

Vyvyane Loh was born in Ipoh, Malaysia, and moved to Singapore with her family at five years old.  During her youth she studied ballet, piano, drama, and poetry before attending Boston University in 1985.  After graduating with a B.A. in biology and classics, she attended Boston University Medical School, and began writing fiction during her subsequent residency at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Massachusetts.  She was awarded a full scholarship in 1999 to pursue an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College

in Ashville, North Carolina.  She is the author of Breaking the Tongue (Norton, 2004), a historical novel set in Singapore during World War II.  Breaking the Tongue was selected

as one of the Top 25 Books of 2004 by the New York Public Library, and nominated for the International IMPAC Award in 2006.  Ms. Loh is also the recipient of the Radcliffe Fellowship in Creative Writing, which gave her the opportunity to work on a second novel at Harvard University.  She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on a third novel, about a young Buddhist writer kept under house arrest in Burma.  Ms. Loh is also a distinguished choreographer, and continues to practice medicine occasionally.