Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai started writing her poetry in Vietnamese while traveling on her motorbike and won the Poetry of the Year 2010 from the Hanoi Writers Association, as well as First Prize, the Poetry Competition about 1,000 years of Hanoi. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Her novels in English, The Mountains Sing and Dust Child are international bestsellers and have received The BookBrowse Best Debut Award, the International Book Awards, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for Fiction, the She Reads Best Historical Fiction Award, as well as Runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her historical fiction, praised by The New York Times as “absorbing, stirring… that in more than one sense, remedies history”, has been translated into more than twenty languages. She has a PhD in Creative from Lancaster University. She was named by Forbes Vietnam as one of twenty inspiring Vietnamese women of 2021.