The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Pākehā father, she was born in London and spent her early years in Papua New Guinea, completing her schooling in New Zealand.
[1][2] Lynda Chanwai-Earle's poetry has appeared in literary journals in New Zealand and elsewhere including Landfall, Hecate and Antic.
Chanwai-Earle represented New Zealand at the inaugural Hong Kong Literary Festival in 2001 and was the NZ Poet Delegate attending the 2002 Asia-Pacific Conference on Indigenous and Contemporary Poetry in Manila, Philippines.
[4] In 2019 Chanwai Earle was the writer in residence at Victoria University of Wellington, working on a film adaptation of her play Man in a Suitcase, based on the real-life murder of a Chinese student in Auckland.
[1][5] In 1996 when she premiered her one-woman show Ka-Shue (Letters Home) in 1996 there was no other reflection of modern Asian-Kiwi identity in professional theatre.
In addition her writing has also been influenced by playwrights Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard, musician Tom Waits, poet Pamala Karol from Los Angeles, authors Amy Tan and William Yan and Australian Chinese playwright and photographer who wrote a solo show called Sadness, which was a strong influence for Chanwai-Earle's solo show Ka Shue.