Ho Minfong, born in 1951 in Myanmar, raised in Thailand and based in USA, is a well-known Singapore children’s author. Among her most famous novels is Sing to the Dawn which has been translated into various languages, used as a school text, staged as a musical for the 1996 Singapore Arts Festival, and adapted into an animated film. She has won numerous local and international awards including the 1997 Cultural Medallion and American Library Association's Caldecott Honour Award. Her stories—set in Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia and Thailand—feature young female protagonists overcoming the trials of poverty, discrimination, injustice and war to face life with optimism and strength.

Ho Minfong was born in 1951 in Yangon, Myanmar to Chinese-Singaporean parents. Her father, the late Ho Rih Hwa, was an economist, ambassador and businessman, and her China-born mother, the late Li Lienfung, was a chemist, businesswoman, columnist, playwright and bilingual writer. As her parents’ business dealings and father’s diplomat postings were largely overseas, the Ho family lived abroad for most of Ho’s growing up years.

Shortly after her birth, Ho’s parents relocated to Bangkok, Thailand, to expand their family’s business there. Ho spent her childhood growing up on the outskirts of Bangkok in “an airy house next to a fishpond and a big garden, with rice fields, where water buffalo wallowed in mudholes, on the other side of the palm trees”. Ho became proficient in three languages as a result of her heritage and upbringing. She grew up speaking Mandarin at home, learnt to speak Thai from her everyday interaction with locals in Bangkok and, later on, learnt English in school. She was educated in Thailand and subsequently enrolled at Tunghai University in Taiwan before transferring to Cornell University in New York, USA.

While studying at Cornell University in the early ’70s, where she later received her BA in Economics and History as well as her M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Ho began to write. Stricken with homesickness, she started writing about the things she missed. Her first book, Sing to the Dawn, set in Thailand, was born from these early writings. Written as a short story in 1972 and submitted to the Council of Interracial Books for Children (New York)’s annual short story contest, Sing to the Dawn won the first prize. Encouraged, Ho later expanded it into a full-length novel that was published in 1975. Sing to the Dawn would become a literature text for secondary school students in Singapore, and was translated into various languages including Chinese, Thai, Korean, Tagalog and French, was successfully staged as a musical by Singapore composer Dick Lee for the 1996 Singapore Arts Festival. In 2008, Sing to the Dawn made it to the big screen and was released as a full-length animated movie.

After graduating from Cornell University in 1973, Ho rejoined her family in Singapore who had relocated there after many years abroad in the early ’70s. She found work as a journalist at The Straits Times, and then moved to Thailand in 1975 where she worked as an English lecturer at Chiang Mai University. There, she became involved in a student movement to alleviate rural poverty. In 1976, after witnessing the massacre of student protestors by the Thai military, she returned to the USA where she married former Cornell University schoolmate John Dennis, and subsequently pursued a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at Cornell Universisty while teaching there from 1978 to 1980. Four years later, affected by reports of the sufferings of survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, Ho returned to Southeast Asia to work as an international aid worker along the Thai-Cambodian border in 1980.

In 1983, Ho, who had written a few short stories in the decade after Sing to the Dawn, returned to writing seriously and moved back to Singapore, becoming the first Writer-in Residence at the National University of Singapore. She would hold this position for seven years. During this period, she created several works and had her first child. Her first novel upon her return, Rice Without Rain, inspired by the socio-political tumult she had experienced years ago in Thailand, was published in 1986 and won several awards including the 1988 National Book Development Council of Singapore Book Award for Fiction, the 1990 Parents' Choice Award (USA) and the American Library Association (ALA) Booklist Editor's Choice.

Other works that followed include Tanjong Rhu and Other Stories (1986); Maples in the Mist: Children’s Poems from the Tang Dynasty (1996), a collection of classical Chinese poems for children which she compiled and translated; novels for older children The Clay Marble (1991), Gathering the Dew (later renamed The Stone Goddess) (2003), and The Green Armchair (2004); children’s picture books of Cambodian folktales The Two Brothers (1995) and Brother Rabbit: A Cambodian Tale (1997), co-written with Saphan Ros; and children’s picture books of Thai stories, Hush! A Thai Lullaby (1996), and Peek! A Thai Hide-and-Seek (2004). Ho would go on to receive many awards including the 1996 Southeast Asian Writers Award and the 1997 American Library Association's Caldecott Honour Award for Hush!. In 1997, Ho received the Cultural Medallion for her contributions to literature in Singapore.

Ho’s works draw largely from the places of her childhood. Written for children and young adults, her stories are set against vividly depicted rural and urban backdrops of Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia and Thailand, growing out of her own experiences of both countries’ tumultuous histories in the ’70s. They feature young female protagonists overcoming almost insurmountable odds, poverty, injustice, indiscrimination, the loss of loved ones, and war to discover their inner strength through family unity. She also drew inspiration later from her experiences as a mother—Hush! (1996) is a playful lullaby for pre-schoolers, and Brother Rabbit (1997) is a Cambodian rabbit folktale-fable. By 2003, when her children were in their teens, Ho had returned to dramatizing political and humanitarian issues in Southeast Asia for older children with Gathering the Dew (later renamed The Stone Goddess) about the horrors of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.

In recent years, Ho’s short stories have been included in numerous anthologies and her works have gone through reprints. Currently residing in Ithaca, New York, with her family, Ho continues to write and divide her time between her family in Asia, Switzerland and the USA.