Nguyen Quang Thieu

Nguyễn Quang Thiều (1957) is a poet, working as editor, fiction writer, playwright, translator and children's author, living in Vietnam and holding high office in the Writers' Unions there.

Born in Hà Tây Province, Nguyễn Quang Thiều entered Ha Noi University in 1975 and began to write poetry in 1982. He studied Spanish and English in Cuba from 1984 to 1989. He currently lives in Hà Đông.

A prolific poet, he has published many collections of poetry in Vietnamese, including: Sự mất ngủ của lửa [The Insomnia of Fire] (1992); Những người đàn bà gánh nước sông [The Women Carry River Water] (1995); Những người lính của làng [The Soldiers of the Village] (1996), a book-length peom; Thơ Nguyễn Quang Thiều [Poetry of Nguyễn Quang Thiều] (1997); Nhịp điệu châu thổ mới (1997); and Bài ca những con chim đêm (2000). Sự mất ngủ của lửa, or The Insomnia of Fire, received the Writer’s Association National Award for poetry in 1993.

In addition to poetry, Nguyễn Quang Thiều has published two novels, five short story collections, three children’s books, and a collection of essays. Two of his short story collections have been translated into French: La Fille Du Fleuve (1997), and La Petite Marchande De Vermicelles (1998). His short story, "Two Village Women," appears in the anthology The Other Side of Heaven: Post-War Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers, edited by Wayne Karlin (Curbstone, 1995).

The bilingual edition of The Women Carry River Water (1997), translated by Martha Collins with assistance by Nguyen Ba Chung, marked the first English translation of a collection of poems by a Vietnamese writer of the post-1975 generation and received an award from The National Translation Association of America in 1998. Many of the individual poems from the collection were published in well-established literary journals in the United States, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Manoa, and Ploughshares.

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Nguyễn Quang Thiều online

• Nguyễn Quang Thiều page at Tiền Vệ.
• "The River" in AGNI.
• Three poems from the Literary Review: "Whispers from the Garden", "Obsession", and "Between Night and Morning"
• "My Mother's Hair", a poem
• "The Inn of Snake Alcohol" in Santa Fe Broadside
• Nguyễn Quang Thiều makes an appearance in W.D. Ehrhart's "A Common Language", a reflection on the "first-ever Conference of U.S. and Vietnamese Veteran-Writers" in Hanoi, June 1990.