Across the Ocean: Nam Le in Conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen

DVAN is thrilled to host an evening with Nam Le, author of The Boat, in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, in Melbourne, Australia for the very first time! Le will be discussing his poetic debut, 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem, an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity—and the violence of identity. For Le, a Vietnamese refugee in the West, this means the assumed violence of racism, oppression, and historical trauma. But it also means the violence of that assumption. Of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture, or language. And the complex violence—for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this—of language itself.

Light refreshments will be provided by a local Vietnamese eatery in Melbourne. Drinks available for purchase at the bar.

Nam Le and Viet Thanh Nguyen will be signing books at the event. All proceeds from the event will go to support the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network.

NAM LE’s poetry has been published in The Monthly, The Paris Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Bomb, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Lana Turner and Tin House. His short story collection The Boat received numerous major international awards, including the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Boat has been republished as a modern classic and is widely translated, anthologised and taught. Nam Le lives in Melbourne.

VIET THANH NGUYEN’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. His other books are the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed; a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published two children’s books: Chicken of the Sea, written in collaboration with his son, Ellison, and Simone, named for his daughter. He is a University Professor at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.

Đất Nước Library

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Host or Publisher The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN)