Ho Anh Thai

Ho Anh Thai is one of the best known contemporary writers in Vietnam and regarded as a literary phenomenon of the post-war generation.

Ho Anh Thai was born in 1960 in Hanoi. He graduated from Hanoi University of Diplomacy in 1983. After graduation, he worked as a diplomat and journalist abroad, especially in India, Iran and Indonesia. Fluent in several foreign languages, he earned a Ph.D. in Oriental Studies and he is also a lecturer and an Indologist. He was the elected president of Hanoi Writers’ Association from 2000 to 2010. He is the Vietnam Deputy Ambassador to Iran (2011-2015), and Indonesia (from 2015).

Ho Anh Thai first became known as a literary teenage prodigy with the publication of his first stories. As he matured, he became a voice for his generation, with his fresh, youthful style of writing, and works that centered on the lives and adventures of young people and students, highlighting their desire to discover the world. Some of his works of this period are the novels Men and Vehicle Run in the Moonlight (1986), The Women on the Island (1986), Behind the Red Mist (1989) and the short story collections The Goat Meat Special (1988), Fragment of a Man (1991), etc. Early in the 1990s, he published a series of humorous and thoughtful stories about the six years he has spent abroad in India: The Man Who Stood on One Leg, The Indian, A Sigh through the Laburnums, The Barter, etc.

From the 2000s, his published books became more experimental, playful in language and marked by a wry and sardonic tone that was both much appreciated by his growing readership and also considered controversial: the novels The Apocalypse Hotel (2002), Ten and One Nights (2006), RHT is Rat Hunt Team (2011), Erased by the Wind (2012) and short stories collections The Narration of 265 Days (2001), Four Paths to the Fun House (2004) etc.

Ho Anh Thai came back to the theme of India with the novel The Buddha, Savitri and I, published in 2007. This is the first Vietnamese novel which contemporizes the Buddha through an interesting plot and simple style set in a multi-layered structure which effectively broadens his use of time and space. Ho Anh Thai’s books have always been best-sellers; part of the phenomenon of his work is that he has a large readership in spite of the way he has eschewed formulaic writing and strives for freshness and originality in form and language.

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