This powerful program brings together three authors whose creative work has emerged from the crucible of war. Nguyen Duy and Larry Heinemann were combat soldiers on opposite sides of the battlefields of Viet Nam, while Sasha Hemon writes about the trauma of war and exile from the perspective of his native Bosnia. They will read from their work and talk with the audience about creativity and survival during and after conflict.
Widely considered the most important Vietnamese poet of his generation, Nguyen Duy began his career as a writer on the battlefields of Vietnam. He has published ten collections of poetry, three collections of memoirs, and a novel. Among his many awards the Vietnam Writers’ Association in 1985. Distant Road, Selected Poems of Nguyen Duy (Curbstone Press, Nov ’99) is the first English translation of his work. Nguyen Duy was born in 1948 in Dong Ve village, Thanh Hoa province, and now lives in Ho Chi Minh City. Mr. Duy will be joined by his translator Nguyen Ba Chung.
Larry Heinemann received the National Book Award for his novel Paco’s Story, a harrowing story of the Vietnam War. He is also the author of Close Quarters, Cooler by the Lake, and editor of An Illustrated Chronicle:American Writers of the Vietnam War, among other works. His short stories and non-fiction have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s and Tri-Quarterly, as well as the Vietnam Writers Association’s Journal of Arts and Letters (Hanoi), and numerous anthologies including The Other Side of Heaven, Between the Lines, and Vietnam Anthology. He is currently working on a book about his recent return trips to Vietnam.
Aleksander (Sasha) Hemon was born in Sarajevo in 1964. He is the author of the newly released collection The Question of Bruno: Stories (Doubleday). AuthorStuart dybed Writes: “To the elite ranks of writers from Eastern “Europe- Conrad, Nabokov, and Kosinski among them—add the name of Aleksandar Hemon.” Hemon moved to Chicago in 1992 with only a basic command of English. He began writing in English in 1995, and his fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Best American Short Stories 1999.