About
Lya Badgley was born in Yangon, Myanmar. The child of Montana parents – a political scientist and an artist – she grew up in a household that encouraged critical thinking and creativity. After dabbling in retail management, Lya moved to the Pacific Northwest in the eighties, becoming a part of the Seattle arts and music scene. In the nineties, after a decade of life as a struggling poet/ musician, she returned to Southeast Asia as a videographer on a clandestine expedition interviewing Burmese insurgents. A year later, she was working as director of Cornell University’s Archival Project, microfilming documents at Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide in Cambodia, helping to bring war criminals to justice. Finishing that, she managed the first foreign-owned project of its kind for the time, opening the 50th Street Bar & Grill Restaurant in Yangon, Myanmar. Since then, Lya has been an elected city council member and a dedicated environmental activist.
She is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, and Hugo House. Her first self-published novel, The Foreigner’s Confession, was released to good reviews in February of 2022. Her second novel, The Worth of a Ruby, launched November 2023. Badgley lives in Snohomish, Washington, and is working on her third novel set in Bosnia.
