Dương Thu Hương

Dương Thu Hương
Dương Thu Hương, 2014
Born	Dương Thu Hương 1947 Thai Binh, Vietnam
Occupation	author
Language	Vietnamese, English, French
Ethnicity	Vietnamese
Period	1985-present
Literary movement	Dissident
Notable works	Paradise of the Blind

Dương Thu Hương (born 1947) is a Vietnamese author and political dissident. Formerly a member of Vietnam's Communist party, she was expelled from the party in 1989, and has been denied the right to travel abroad, and was temporarily imprisoned for her writings and outspoken criticism of corruption in the Vietnamese government.

Born in 1947 in Thai Binh a province in northern Vietnam, Dương came of age just as the Vietnam War was turning violent. At the age of twenty, when she was a student at Vietnamese Ministry of Culture’s Arts College, Dương Thu Hương volunteered to serve in a women’s youth brigade on the front lines of “The War Against the Americans". Dương spent the next seven years of the war in the jungles and tunnels of Bình Trị Thiên, the most heavily bombarded region of the war. Her mission was to “sing louder than the bombs” and to give theatrical performances for the North Vietnamese troops, but also to tend to the wounded, bury the dead, and accompany the soldiers along. She was one of three survivors out of the forty volunteers in that group. She was also at the front during China’s attacks on Vietnam in 1979 during the short-lived Sino-Vietnamese War. However, in the period after Vietnam’s reunification in 1975, Dương became increasingly outspoken and critical about the repressive atmosphere created by the Communist government. Upon seeing the conditions in the South – compared with the North – she began speaking out against the communist government.

Her first novels, Journey in Childhood (Hành trình ngày thơ ấu, 1985), Beyond Illusions (Bên kia bờ ảo vọng, 1987),Paradise of the Blind (Những thiên đường mù, 1988) and The Lost Life (Quãng đời đánh mất, 1989) were published in her native Vietnam and soon became bestsellers in Vietnam before they were banned. The third one was also the first Vietnamese novel ever published in the United States in English. Her next three books — Novel Without a Name (Tiểu thuyết vô đề, 1991),Memories of a Pure Spring (2000), and No Man's Land (Chốn vắng, 2002) — have not been published in the United States. She was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (1994). She earlier wrote a number of short stories and screenplays. One story, "Reflections of Spring," was translated by Linh Dinh and included in the anthology, Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 2006). The latest novel No Man's Land (Terre des oublis in French, which won the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle (2007)), perhaps her most successful, was in the final list of the prize Femina 2006 and received the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle in 2007.