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Laurence Michael Yep (j=Jip6 Coeng4 Tim1; born June 14, 1948) is an American writer. He is known for his children's books, having won the Newbery Medal twice for his Golden Mountain series. In 2005, he received the Children's Literature Legacy Award for his career contribution to American children's literature.
Yep was named by his older brother Thomas, who had just been studying the biography of Saint Lawrence for school. He spent his early childhood commuting from his neighborhood to a Catholic school in Chinatown for Chinese children, where he was often made fun of by the mostly bilingual students for only knowing how to speak English.
Not until high school when Yep attended a less segregated Catholic school did he confront white American culture in person, having grown up among Black and Chinese kids. Although he had always been interested in science, at St. Ignatius College Preparatory, he also became interested in literature and creative writing. Yep published his first story in a science fiction magazine at the age of 18 while still in high school. His English teacher, a Jesuit priest, motivated him to submit his story to magazines until it got published if he wanted to get an A grade. This experience inspired Yep to first consider what a career in writing might be like, even though he had always been fascinated with machines and wanted to become a chemist.
Yep graduated from St. Ignatius College Preparatory in 1966.
His decision to become a writer did not come until he entered college at Marquette University. Harper Collins, Laurence Yep Biography , accessed September 16, 2007 There he became friends with a literary magazine editor, Joanne Ryder, whom he eventually married. She introduced him to children's literature and later encouraged him to write a book for children while she was working at Harper & Row. The result was his first science fiction novel for teens entitled Sweetwater, published by Harper & Row in 1973. After two years at Marquette, Yep transferred to UC Santa Cruz where he earned a BA in 1970. He later earned a PhD in literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
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During his writing career, Yep also taught creative writing and Asian-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara.
Yep's most notable collection of works is the Golden Mountain Chronicles, documenting the fictional Young family from 1849 in China to 1995 in America. Two of the series are Newbery Medal, or runners-up for the annual Newbery Medal: Dragonwings (Harper & Row, 1975) and Dragon's Gate (HarperCollins, 1993). Dragonwings won the Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association in 1995, recognizing the best children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award. It won the Carter G. Woodson Book Award in 1976, and has been adapted as a play under its original title. Another of the Chronicles, Child of the Owl won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for children's fiction in 1977. ( The Rainbow People, Yep's collection of short stories based on Chinese folktales and legends, was a Horn Book runner-up in 1989.)
Yep wrote two other notable series, Chinatown Mysteries and Dragon (1982 to 1992). The latter is an adaptation of Chinese mythology as four fantasy novels.
In 2005 the professional children's librarians awarded Yep the Children's Literature Legacy Award, which recognizes an author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have made "a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children". The committee noted that "Yep explores the dilemma of the cultural outsider" with "attention to the complexity and conflict within and across cultures" and it cited four works in particular: Dragonwings, The Rainbow People, The Khan's Daughter, and the autobiographical The Lost Garden.
A live-action/CGI TV movie of The Tiger's Apprentice, adapted by David Magee, was being developed by Cartoon Network until it was cancelled after Cartoon Network stopped developing live-action projects. In March 2019, Paramount Pictures announced an animated film adaptation of the book with a script by Magee and a release date of February 2, 2024.
January 27, 2024 was Tiger's Apprentice world premiere in Los Angeles. Paramount Plus released Tiger's Apprentice on its streaming platform February 2, 2024.
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