Introduced and translated by Ton-That Quynh-Du 

Born in 1960 in Hai Duong province, Pham Thi Hoai Nam grew up in North Vietnam and in 1977 went to Germany to study at Humboldt University. She returned to Vietnam in 1983 to live in Hanoi where she worked as an archivist and began to write. Her translation into Vietnamese of Jorge Amado’s The Swallow and The Tom Cat was published in 1986 and of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Judge and his Hangman in 1987. Her first novel, Thien Su (The Crystal Messenger), was published in 1988. Since then she has published essays, two collections of short stories, Me Lo (1989), Man Nuong (1995), and another novel, Marie Sen (1996). Thien Su (The Crystal Messenger) has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Finnish. In 1993 Pham Thi Hoai left Vietnam for Berlin where she now lives with her partner and their child. 

For decades politics and literature in Vietnam have been interlinked. With the ascendancy of Marxism, writers and artists were expected to participate in the national struggle, to serve the people and to support the common cause. Running more deeply is a traditional view in which literature is regarded as an instrument for the betterment of the society. Pham Thi Hoai’s writing is at odds with both of these expectations. While her work has attracted enthusiastic acclaim from readers and literary critics, she has been criticized by Vietnam’s cultural bureaucrats for her lack of respect for traditions and her disregard of social taboos. Pham Thi Hoai has never been accused of political dissent. Instead, her detractors have charged her with holding an ‘excessively pessimistic view’ of Vietnam, of abusing the ‘sacred mission of a writer’ and even of ‘salacious’ writing. But even her strongest critics acknowledge that she is a writer with a keen eye for detail, a humorous, acerbic wit and a fine ear for the rhythms of the Vietnamese language.