Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) | Across the Ocean: Viet Thanh Nguyen in Conversation with Nam Le
Date and time
Friday, May 10 · 6 – 9pm AEST
Location
Brunswick Mechanics Institute270 Sydney Road Brunswick, VIC 3056 AustraliaShow map
Refund Policy
Contact the organizer to request a refund.
About this event
- 3 hours
WELCOME
DVAN is thrilled to host an evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with Nam Le, author of The Boat, in Melbourne, Australia for the first time! Le will be discussing his new book of poems, 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem, an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity—and the violence of identity.
Light refreshments will be provided by a local Vietnamese eatery in Melbourne. Drinks available for purchase at the bar.
Viet Thanh Nguyen and Nam Le will be signing books at the event. This is a fundraising event. All proceeds from the event will go to support the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, whose mission is to uplift the voices and stories of the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diaspora.
As part of DVAN’s mission to uplift writers of the diaspora, we are committed to supporting Vietnamese writers from Australia. Nam Le from Melbourne joined our first writers residency at the beautiful Djerassi Arts in Northern California in 2018. In 2023, our New Author Fellowship was awarded to Vivian Pham from Sydney, who attended a month-long residency at the prestigious Millay Arts in upstate New York. Sheila Ngoc Pham, the organizer of this fundraising event, also from Sydney, has been a Contributing Editor to our online journal, diaCRITICS, since 2018. We are excited that Australian writers Tracey Lien and André Dao will be included in our new book, The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora, forthcoming from the University of California Press in 2025.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
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.
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.
