Monique Truong
“Writers or rather our works begin the conversations about the difficult, unanswerable subjects of life, and often our works keep the conversations going when everyone else would rather forget. We are the antidote to bread and circuses.”
“A delicate, impressionistic tale . . . Truong is exploring personal memory in all its creative and contradictory subjectivity . . . [The Sweetest Fruits] is propelled not by action but by the retrospective piecing together that happens once a relationship is over. Spurred by nostalgia, regret, longing and anger, each woman examines her memories . . . As Setsu observes, ‘to tell another’s story is to bring him to life,’ but here it’s the women who achieve that feat rather than the man who connected them.”
“A marvelous mixture of fact and imagination . . . Truong’s lush style is on gorgeous display in these pages, her imagery evoking hidden emotional depths . . . While the lives, loves and adventures of Lafcadio Hearn hold center stage in this novel, these are set off by a rich brocade of social critiques — of slavery, colonization and the repression of women. With great generosity and compassion, Truong explores the difference between writing and telling stories, with the question of who gets to speak and who remains silent.”
“Vietnamese American writer Monique Truong’s bone is the outsider’s plight, and her pen is a scalpel, laying perfect words down along that nerve until even the happiest reader understands what it means to forever stand apart from your family and the larger society you inhabit.”
Monique Truong is the author of the novel, The Sweetest Fruits (Viking Books, 2019), winner of the 2020 John Gardner Fiction Award, which Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, called “remarkable.” It is also a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and was named a 25 Best Fiction Books by Barnes & Noble, a 10 Best Fiction Books by Hudson Booksellers, and the adult fiction Honor Book by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association.
Her first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller and the recipient of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, Bard Fiction Prize, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship for Writers, Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literary Award, Association for Asian American Studies Poetry/Prose Award, and an Asian American Literary Award. The Book of Salt was also honored as a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, a Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction Books, a Village Voice’s 25 Favorite Books, and a Miami Herald’s Top 10 Books, among other citations.
Truong's debut children's picture book, Mai's Áo Dài, co-authored with designer Thai Nguyen and illustrated by the New York Times bestselling Dung Ho, will be published in the Fall of 2024 by Caitlyn Dlouhy Books at Atheneum Books (Simon & Schuster).
Truong is the co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition (DVAN Series, Texas Tech University Press, 2023) and editor of Vom Lasterleben am Kai (C.H. Beck, 2017), a collection of reportage by Lafcadio Hearn, a.k.a. Koizumi Yakumo, the writer who is the subject of The Sweetest Fruits.
Truong contributes essays, often about food or memory or both, to O Magazine, Real Simple, Marie Claire, Town & Country, Condé Nast Traveler, Allure, Saveur, Food & Wine, New York Times and its T Magazine for which she wrote “Ravenous,” a monthly online food column, NPR's The Salt, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Times of London (Saturday Magazine), Time Magazine (Asia edition), and other publications.
In an interview discussing her writing process, Truong notes, “I begin with a character who fascinates me. I focus first on that character’s voice. Reading aloud is a large part of my writing process because I want to 'hear' my characters. So far, I’ve written novels only in the first person voice. I don’t see that changing. I like the limitations of the first person voice. I like working within the restrictions of a particular character’s vocabulary and emotional range or lack thereof. I’m also a firm believer that for every story there are many other versions of that story that are not being told. The first person voice, for me, is all about highlighting that sharing and withholding.”
As a librettist, Truong has worked with composers such as Joan La Barbara, Shih-Hui Chen, Francisco J. Núñez, and Randall Eng. Most recently, or/and, a multimedia chamber operatic poem for Chen, had its world premiere at the Asia Society, Texas Center, and "MAP: A New World," a choral work for Núñez and commissioned by the Juilliard School, world premiered at St. John the Divine in New York City.
A Guggenheim Fellow, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellow in Tokyo, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellow, Visiting Writer at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College (CUNY), and Agnes Scott College's Kirk Writer-in-Residence, Truong was most recently the Frank B. Hanes Writer-in-Residence at UNC-Chapel Hill.
She has been awarded writing residencies at Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bogliasco, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi, Ucross Foundation, Ledig House International Writers’ Residency, Lannan Foundation, Akrai Residency, Sea Change Residency, Fundacion Valparaiso, and Santa Maddalena Foundation, among others.
Truong is also an intellectual property attorney. Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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