Episode 50: Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, award-winning poet and author of The Mountains Sing

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, award-winning author and poet

Key Topics:
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, chats about The Mountains Sing. This novel is already a New York Times Editors’ choice, and winner of several awards including the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship. Plus it’s been named a best book in 2020 by the Washington Post , *O, The Oprah Magazine, USA Today, NPR’s Book Concierge and tens more publications! Plus, it also happens to be her first novel, written in the English language.

Interview Notes:

We chat about her breath-taking novel set in Vietnam, THE MOUNTAINS SING, which won so many accolades upon its release last year and just recently released in paperback.

Quế Mai chats about the difficult of publishing Vietnamese names in English- how the language is normally stripped of its full tonal marks, but she insisted this not happen for her novel.

And you can tell through her passion for this kind of storytelling and for Vietnamese language, culture and history why Quế Mai was recently chosen by Forbes Magazine as one of The Twenty Inspiring Vietnamese women of 2021!

We chat about her frustration at how Vietnamese stories are depicted as background to American stories, and her goal to put the Vietnamese people on the center stage and reclaim the narrative for Vietnamese women, representing the culture and richness of traditions.

Also how to deal with the burden of responsibility in representing a culture and history, and why Quế Mai has hundreds of drafts of this novel on her computer!

Lately she’s been reading books by Professor Wayne Karlin, who fought in the Vietnam war and wrote several books where Vietnames characters are given space and complexity.