Former Vietnamese Boat Refugee Won Dylan Thomas Prize

Nam Le, a Vietnamese refugee who escaped Viet Nam in 1979 by boat with his parents as a three-month-old to Australia has won the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize on Nov. 10, for his debut collection of short stories, The Boat.

The biennial Dylan Thomas prize was launched in 2006, which is part of the Dylan Thomas Festival, to encourage creative talent in writers under the age of 30 whose work has been published in the English language. Mr. Le is 29 years old.

The £60,000 prize is one of the highest paying literary awards in the world, sponsored by the University of Wales, UK. Nam Le won in a stiff competition with five finalists from around the world including a 22-year old Leeds poet Caroline Bird, South African, Ceridwen Dovey, and Ethiopian journalist, Dinaw Mengestu.

The Boat is a collection of short stories from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran, from New York to Iowa City, and from a floundering vessel in the South China Sea to a tiny fishing village in Australia.

After the fall of Saigon, Viet Nam in 1975, Nam Le’s father spent three years in the so-called re-education camp, tortured, indoctrinated, and starved. In 1979, Mr. Le senior organized the family’s escape to Australia.

In The Boat, the author drew from his parents’ terrifying experience and journey from Viet Nam to Australia. The author departed from real life when he wrote in his story that the fictional father had destroyed one of his son’s stories. In real life, his father had offered instead, to translate the tales.

When the Le's family arrived to Australia, both parents had to work at 3 different factory jobs for many years in order to survive. The family lived in various working class neighborhoods, Footscray, North Melbourne, Collingwood, and Richmond. Over time, the Le finally saved enough money to start a textile factory in Collingwood, Australia.

Nam Le received a full scholarship to attend an elite Melbourne Grammar School that opened doors for him to pursue a university education which included a degree in arts law from the University of Melbourne.

During his two-year stint in a law firm, he wrote a 700-page novel that was tossed, except for a few chapters that earned an acceptance into the Masters Program of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Iowa. Whether it was good fortune and talent, or skill, or a combination of all three, the Iowa experience opened new doors for Le in the competitive literary world.

Prior to the Dylan Thomas award, Nam Le has previously won the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown, and Phillips Exeter Academy.

In Sept., 2008, the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” Fiction Selection named Nam Le along with Matthew Eck, Keith Gessen, Sana Krasikov, and Fiona Maazel. The award will be held on Nov. 17 at Tribeca Cinemas, New York.

Currently, Nam Le is working in New York, where he is the fictional editor of the Harvard Review, and in 2009, he will be a residence at the East Anglia University, UK, where he plans to work on his next book.