Tran Vu
Trần Vũ (1962) is a fiction writer, essayist and editor, living in France.
Born in Saigon and coming of age during the final years of the Vietnam War, Trần Vũ was sixteen years old when he and his older brother fled Vietnam by boat in 1978. After surviving a shipwreck, he spent a year in the Palawan refugee camp in the Philippines. With the help of the Red Cross, he resettled in France in December of 1979. He now lives in a Paris suburb and works as a computer analyst.
Deep psychic pains, cruelties, degradation and perversions anchor his fiction. Alternating between a crisp, no-nonsense prose and a perversely-wrought archaism, his writing extends the language in contrary directions. His work is available in English through the collection, The Dragon Hunt (Hyperion, 1999), translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Đường, which includes the story "Nhã Nam," where Nguyễn Huy Thiệp appears as a character. Another story, "Gunboat on the Yangtze," is in the anthology Night, Again (1996). He is also included The Other Side of Heaven (Curbstone Press, 1995).
He is available in French through the collection, Sous Une Pluie d’Epines (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), translated by Phan Huy Đường. Also through Phan Huy Đường, he is included in these French anthologies, Terre des Ephemeres (1994), Au Rez de Chaussée du Paradis (1994) and En traversant Le Fleuve (1996).
Hai-Dang Phan started this entry.
Works
- Cái Chết Sau Quá Khứ [The Death Behind the Past], stories (California: Hồng Lĩnh, 1993)
- Ngôi Nhà Sau Lưng Văn Miếu [The House Behind the Temple of Literature], stories (California: Thời Văn, 1989; reissued by Hồng Lĩnh in 1994)
Trần Vũ online
- Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Đường's translation of "The Coral Reef"
- Trần Vũ page on Da Màu, with several stories translated into English
- Judith Coburn reviews The Dragon Hunt, on Salon.com
- Francine Prose reviews The Dragon Hunt, in the New York Times
- Cecilia Wren reviews The Dragon hunt, in the Village Voice
- Kim Ninh reviews The Dragon Hunt, in Persimmon
- Trần Vũ discussing Lynh Bacardi
- Trần Vũ discussing Hợp Lưu
- Trần Vũ's personal webpage, with many works in Vietnamese
- Interviewed by Lê Quỳnh Mai
- "Sàigòn, ngày lạ mặt"
- Editors
- Essayists
- Fiction writers
- Working in Vietnamese
- Editors publishing in Vietnamese
- Essayists composing in Vietnamese
- Fiction writers composing in Vietnamese
- Translated into English
- Fiction writers translated into English
- Translated from Vietnamese into English
- Fiction writers translated from Vietnamese into English
- Translated into French
- Fiction writers translated into French
- Translated from Vietnamese into French
- Fiction writers translated from Vietnamese into French
- Born 1960-1969
- Man
- Man born 1960-1969
- Entries started by Linh Dinh