Best-Selling Author Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai on Vietnamese Literature

Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is an award-winning Vietnamese writer. She is the author of eleven books of poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction. Her books in Vietnamese have won the 2010 Poetry of the Year Award from the Hanoi Writers Association and first prize in the Poetry Competition celebrating 1,000 Years of Hanoi. Her debut novel and first book in English, The Mountains Sing, is an international bestseller and won the 2021 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. She regularly writes for Vietnamese newspapers and her writing has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, BBC Vietnamese, LitHub, and Poets & Writers Magazine. Her second novel in English, Dust Child, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books.