Major Books Works:

Parallel (Song Song)

The Young Die Old (Những đứa trẻ chết già)

NGUYỄN AN LÝ lives in Hochiminh City. She has over 20 translations into Vietnamese, published under various names and in various genres, including authors such as Margaret Atwood, Donna Tartt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Flanagan, J. L. Borges, and the poetry in The Lord of the Rings. As an editor, she has worked on translations from Nabokov, A. S. Byatt, Roland Barthes, Joseph Campbell, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Liu Cixin, among others. Chinatown by Thuận, her debut translation into English, won an English PEN Translates Award and the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. She co-founds and co-edits the independent online Zzz Review.

Photography by Nguyễn Đức Tú

Major Books Works:

The Chronicle of Water (Biên sử nước)

Nguyễn Bình is a writer native to Hanoi, Vietnam. Born into a family of historians and anti-colonial revolutionaries, Bình grew up with a belief in literature as an art that depicts and confronts the conditions of society. Their poetry, fiction and translations all aim to connect ancient traditions and canons in order to motivate a look into what it is like to be human in the modern world.

Bình’s verse translation of Nguyễn Du’s The Tale of Kiều received the Young Writers Award for Translation from the Vietnamese Writers’ Association. Their poetry in Vietnamese and English has been featured in magazines and anthologies in Vietnam and the U.S. Currently, Bình is seeking to publish their debut novel The Drum Comes Home, a magical realism retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight centered on art repatriation and belonging in the twenty-first century. They are also working on the first Vietnamese translation of Vergil’s Aeneid.

Bình graduated from the University of Arizona with a B.S. in Astronomy and a B.A. in Linguistics. Their research on cosmological simulations of Milky Way-mass galaxies was presented at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Bình is currently a doctoral student in Astronomy at the University of Washington.

Major Books Works:

The Tale of Kieu (Truyện Kiều)

Major Books Works:

The Young Die Old (Những đứa trẻ chết già)

Nguyễn Du (1766-1820) was a brilliant poet and cultural figure in the early Lê and Nguyễn dynasties of Vietnam. He is widely revered as the “National Poet Laureate” (Đại Thi hào Dân tộc) and honored by UNESCO as a “World Cultural Figure” (Danh Nhân Văn Hóa Thế Giới).

His epic poem, The Tale of Kiều, is considered a literary masterpiece, one of the most representative achievements in medieval Vietnamese literature. It remains imbued with influence in contemporary Vietnamese thought and culture. It is safe to say that one cannot truly learn modern Vietnamese language and culture without learning The Tale of Kiều.

Major Books Works:

The Tale of Kieu (Truyện Kiều)

Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, a talented and highly acclaimed female writer of the Vietnam Writers Association (Hội Nhà Văn Việt Nam), was born in 1976 in Cà Mau – the southernmost of Vietnam’s 63 provinces. With passion, she writes tirelessly and diligently, choosing the most familiar and endearing subjects from her life as basis for her stories, with a quintessentially Southern tonality that has become a signature of her writing.

Her short story collection Cánh đồng bất tận (Endless Fields) has received numerous awards, including the LiBeraturpreis Prize 2018, and has been adapted for the stage and screen.

In 2019, she was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the Top 50 most influential women in Vietnam of 2018. Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s works have been reprinted many times and translated into Korean, English, Swedish, and German.

Major Books Works:

The Chronicle of Water (Biên sử nước)

ren n. dinh (Mai) is a non-binary writer of both academic and creative texts. They graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a Bachelor’s in English Literature, and Hanoi National University of Education with a Master’s in Literary Theory. Their Master’s thesis explores how queer Vietnamese gay poetry reimagines the body through intergenerational trauma, hegemonic discourse, and sexual intimacy. 

Their research focuses on queer theory and queer Vietnamese and Asian American literature, tapping into the intellectual excitement and critical empathy that a queer Asian diaspora can enable and liberate. They also run a personal WordPress where they share their original creative works, essays, and translations. During their scant free time and when they are not procrastinating, they enjoy watching video essays on various pop culture and subculture phenomena, reading manga, and drafting fanfiction and thinkpieces that may or may not see the light of day.

Major Books Works:

To Whore (Làm Đĩ)