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Duong Thu Huong
Duong Thu Huong was born in the Thai Binh province of North Vietnam in 1947.
At the age of twenty, she led a Communist Theatrical Youth Brigade sent to the front during the Vietnam War to support the troops’ morale. She was an active patriot in her youth, foregoing an offer to study abroad in favor of serving her country. She was shocked to discover that the “American war” was also a civil war. As a young woman she worked as a writer and was active in the artistic community. At one point she held a job as a screenwriter in the government’s movie industry, and later was commissioned to ghostwrite a history of the Vietnam War by a group of army generals. Here she had an early glimpse of government censorship, as she was asked to increase the reported number of Vietnamese who had died in the war, and her text was repeatedly changed to suit the interests of her mentors.
At the start of the 1980s, she spoke out at official Communist Party events and at congresses of the writers' organizations, as well as in interviews for various Party publications, criticizing bureaucracy, corruption, and "intellectual cowardice." She became a party member in 1985, the same year that she published her first novel, Beyond Illusions, which addressed the disappointment of a generation who had believed that victory and independence would be followed by democracy and honesty – not corruption and rampant greed.
A ban of her work was ordered after she published her third novel Paradise of the Blind about the horrors of land reform from 1953. Duong continued to be a vocal advocate of human rights and democratic reform. She turned down a bribe meant to silence her offered by the Party’s general secretary, Nguyen Van Linh, and shortly afterwards found herself the target of two assassination attempts. She was expelled from the Communist Party in 1990, and in 1991 she was arrested and imprisoned without trial. She was accused of selling secrets to foreigners, though the secrets were in fact her own manuscripts, which she was smuggling out of the country in order to have them published abroad. In response to the threats and injustice she endured, Duong has said, “My principle is that you can lose everything, even your life, but never your honor.”
Since 1991, the novels she has sent abroad for publication—Novel Without A Name, Memories of A Pure Spring, and No Man's Land—have all been translated into French and English and published in over 10 languages.
After her release in 1991, Duong was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (1994). In 1999, she received the Prince Claus Foundation Award for and the Grinzane Cavour literary award in 2005. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Prix Femina foreign category (1992, 1996, 2006) and for the International Dublin IMPAC Award (1997).
Duong moved from Vietnam to live in France in 2005 and is today, de facto, in exile. She continues to write about life under the communist regime and the injustice she has witnessed and experienced in her home land. Her writing is her own act of patriotism, a continued demonstration that she will not succumb to fear or censorship. But this rebel will not join “organized” rebellion: she refuses to carry a card of any kind, while fiercely fighting for the rights of her friends who are jailed for their courage, and for the memory of those who have died.
Though many of her novels are banned in Vietnam, she remains one of the most popular and controversial writers for Vietnamese readers both at home and abroad. She has received many literary distinctions including Prix Fémina étranger (short listed 1991, 1996,2006) Hammet-Hellman Foundation Award, United States (1992), Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France (1994), International Dublin IMPAC Award, Ireland (short listed, 1997), Grinzane Cavour Prize, Italy, (June 2005), the PEN Novib Freedom of Expression Award, The Hague (2006) and the Elle magazine award for best novel of the year (2007). No Man’s Land has been a bestseller in France, with over 200 000 copies sold.
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