Wayson Choy was born in Vancouver, Canada on April 20, 1939. He graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1962. After working in advertising, he became a professor at Humber College. He taught there for more than 25 years.
His first novel, The Jade Peony, was published in 1995 and received a Trillium Award and the City of Vancouver Book Award. His second novel, All That Matters, was published in 2004 and received the Trillium Prize. He also wrote two memoirs entitled Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood, which received the Edna Staebler Prize for Creative Non-Fiction, and Not Yet: A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying. In 2005, he was named to the Order of Canada. In 2015, he received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for an outstanding literary career in B.C. He died after suffering cardiac arrest on April 27, 2019 at the age of 80.
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