[1] A French citizen born in Singapore, Sze-Lorrain grew up trilingual and has lived mostly in Paris and New York City.

[3] In 2007, Sze-Lorrain worked with Gao Xingjian on a book of photography, essays, and poetry based on his film Silhouette/Shadow.

[4] Through Mark Strand, whose work she would later translate into French,[5] she found her poetic vocation, crediting him for having introduced her to poetry.

[9] Published during the COVID-19 pandemic, her fourth collection Rain in Plural (Princeton University Press, 2020) contains many "poems that resonate with a political undertone, and they often suggest in the midst of great threats we persist and continue our important work, aware we alone are not the only or even the most vulnerable.

These "women’s stories weave together in understated and inventive ways" while "the novel serves as "a multilayered meditation on intergenerational trauma, memory, and resilience.

"[15] The Rumpus said of her writing that it "serves as a vital midwife for the greater global understanding that will one day be born from today’s contracting and relaxing tensions between differing religions, cultures, and languages.

"[20] Prairie Schooner describes her work as an "arc" that "navigates the sense of otherness" with poems that "burst at the seams with the customs, gastronomy, ancestry, literature, and art of the two cultures.

"[21] Publishers Weekly calls her novel in stories "graceful" and "this author is one to watch" as she "effortlessly evokes the spirit of each setting" and "imbues her characters with haunting melancholy.

The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, Ledig House, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, among others, she is the inaugural writer-in-residence at MALBA in Buenos Aires.

Sze-Lorrain lives in Paris with her husband Philippe Lorrain, cofounder of the French magazine Interférences (1974–1982), art director and independent publisher.