Nam Le

In 1979, Nam Le's family left Vietnam for Australia, an experience that inspires the first and last stories in The Boat. In between, however, Le's imagination lays claim to the world. The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Colombia; from an ageing New York artist to a boy coming of age in...

Selected as one of the New York Public Library’s Best New Poetry Books Fifteen years after his best-selling, award-winning collection of stories The Boat, Nam Le returns to his great themes of identity and representation in a virtuosic debut book of poetry. 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem says Le, a Vietnamese refugee to Australia, is ‘the book I...

A thrilling take on one of Australia's most acclaimed writers, David Malouf, which reveals much about literary craft while examining the complexities of the 'Australianness' of his work. Here was a very-much-alive half-Lebanese writer (from provincial Brisbane, no less) producing English-language writing of the very first order ... The poetry was in the prose; it stayed and sprung its rhythms,...