Wilawan Pellaumail-Téjanant is Thai. She lived in Bangkok from her birth in 1954 until 1989. After studying at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok in French language and literature, she was a translator for the Department of Fine Arts of the Thai Ministry of Education. She then continued her studies in France, at the University of Aix-Marseille I, where she defended a doctoral thesis on the subject: "Problems of literary translation in the pair of Thai and French languages".