Anne Evelyn Bunting was born in Maghera to Sloan Edmund Bolton, a postmaster, and Mary (née Canning) Bolton, a homemaker. She married business executive Edward Davidson Bunting, whom she met in college, on March 26, 1950, and has three children. She was educated in Belfast, Northern Ireland, attending Methodist College in the early 1940s and graduating in 1945;[3] she then attended Queen's University, where she met her husband. After marrying, the couple moved to Scotland and started their family.
In 1958, Bunting immigrated to the United States with her husband and three children, later attending Pasadena City College in 1959. Bunting then enrolled in a community college writing course.[4] Of her first published story, The Two Giants, she said, "I thought everybody in the world knew that story, and when I found they didn't - well, I thought they should."[5]
Bunting died of pneumonia in Santa Cruz, California, on October 1, 2023, at the age of 94.[6]
