Background

Monique Truong was born on May 13, 1968, in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), Vietnam. She was six years old when she and her mother left Vietnam in April of 1975 and moved to South Carolina, United States. Her father, who was a high-level executive for an international oil company, initially stayed behind for work. When Saigon fell, he moved to the family.

Education

Monique Truong studied at Alief Hastings High School, Houston, Texas. Then she went to Yale University where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature 1990. In 1995 she received a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree at Columbia Law School in 1995.

Career

Monique Truong initially worked as an intellectual property attorney before becoming a writer. She published her first novel, The Book of Salt, in 2003. It became a national bestseller. The departure, the loss of home, that act of refuge seeking have everything to do with the themes playing themselves out in The Book of Salt. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, was published in 2010. The novel is written in a stream of consciousness narrative structure and follows the character of Linda Hammerick. Her recent published work is the novel The Sweetest Fruits (2019). Truong is the editor of Vom Lasterleben am Kai (2017), a collection of reportage by Lafcadio Hearn, a.k.a. Koizumi Yakumo, the subject of her novel The Sweetest Fruits. She is also a contributing co-editor of Watermark: An Anthology of Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose (1998).

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, Gourmet, the New York Times and its T Magazine for which she wrote “Ravenous,” a monthly online food column, the Times of London (Saturday Magazine), Time Magazine (Asia edition), and other publications. In collaboration with the composer/performer/sound artist Joan La Barbara, Truong has written the lyrics for a choral work, a song cycle, and is at work on a libretto for an opera inspired by Joseph Cornell and Virginia Woolf.

A Guggenheim Fellow, United States-Japan Creative Artists Fellow in Tokyo, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellow, and a Visiting Writer at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Truong also was the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College in the Fall of 2016. Truong currently serves as vice president of The Authors Guild.

Achievements

• Monique Truong's work has been published in fifteen countries. She received National Book Award, New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, Bard Fiction Prize, Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, Association for Asian American Studies Award, and an Asian American Literary Award. Her novels were recognized as the best by the New York Times, a Chicago Tribune, a Village Voice, Miami Herald, Barnes & Noble, Hudson Booksellers, and the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Sweetest Fruits

    (A Greek woman tells of how she willed herself out of her ...)

    2019
  • The Book of Salt

    (The Book of Salt serves up a wholly original take on Pari...)

    2003
  • Bitter in the Mouth

    (“What I know about you, little girl, would break you in t...)

    2010

Views

Quotations: "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."

"I like to think that I'm a part of their collective memory as much as they are a part of mine - that we belong to each other."

"What if there was not a war, what then would make a person leave the land of their birth behind."

"Immigrants are optimists at heart. War refugees, the subset to which I belong, are even more so."

Membership

Truong serves on the Creative Advisory Council for Hedgebrook, the Bogliasco Fellowship Advisory Committee, and the Advisory Committee of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. For PEN America, she was the Chair of the Literary Awards Committee (2014-2017) and a member of the Advisory Council.

Personality

When Monique Truong is not writing, which is most of the time, she cooks and takes naps. She lacks many basic life skills such as knowing how to drive a car, ride a bicycle, and has only recently learned how to read a map. She walks long distances, especially if there is a very good bakery located at the end of that walk. The only thing that she really likes to exercise is her right to vote.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Monique Truong is a brilliant and inspired writer."
  
  "I'm amazed by the skill Monique Truong has to unfold her story with such beauty and detail and depth of insight."
  
  "Monique Truong has the capacity to write a great novel."
  
  "Monique Truong has an eye and an ear for detail, and she translates it beautifully into the written word."

Interests

• cooking