Hồ Anh Thái Explained

Hồ Anh Thái, one of the best known contemporary novelists in Vietnam, is regarded as a literary phenomenon of the post-war generation.

Biography

Ho Anh Thai was born in 1960 in Hanoi. He graduated from Hanoi University of Diplomacy in 1983. After graduation, he worked as a diplomat abroad, especially in India, Iran and Indonesia. Fluent in several foreign languages, he earned a Ph.D. in Oriental Studies and he is also an Indologist and a visiting professor in the University of Washington and foreign universities.

Ho Anh Thai was the elected president of Hanoi Writers’ Association from 2000 to 2010. And he was appointed the Vietnam Deputy Ambassador to Iran (2011-2015), and Indonesia (2015-2018).

Literary career

Ho Anh Thai first became known as a literary teenage prodigy with the publication of his first stories. As he matured, he became a voice for his generation, with his fresh, youthful style of writing, and works that centered on the lives and adventures of young people and students, highlighting their desire to discover the world. Some of his works of this period are the novels Men and Vehicle Run in the Moonlight (1986), The Women on the Island (1986), Behind the Red Mist (1989) and the short story collections The Goat Meat Special (1988), Fragment of a Man (1991), etc. Early in the 1990s, he published a series of humorous and thoughtful stories about the six years he has spent in India: The Man Who Stood on One Leg, The Indian, A Sigh through the Laburnums, The Barter, etc.

From the 2000s, his published books became more experimental, playful in language and marked by a wry and sardonic tone that was both much appreciated by his growing readership and also considered controversial: the novels The Apocalypse Hotel (2002), Ten and One Nights (2006), RHT is Rat Hunt Team (2011), Erased by the Wind (2012), His Children are Scattered on the Road (2014), Burning Van Gogh (2018), Five Letters of Credence (2019) etc. and short stories collections The Narration of 265 Days (2001), Four Paths to the Fun House (2004), Man is Here and the Sky is There (2013) etc.

Ho Anh Thai came back to the theme of India with the novel The Buddha, Savitri and I, published in 2007. This is the first Vietnamese novel which contemporizes the Buddha through an interesting plot and simple style set in a multi-layered structure which effectively broadens his use of time and space. In 2022 he published another novel about ancient India, The Buddha, the Robber Queen and the Spy.

Ho Anh Thai's books have always been best-sellers; part of the phenomenon of his work is that he has a large readership in spite of the way he has eschewed formulaic writing and strives for freshness and originality in form and language. His fiction has been published abroad, translated into over ten languages, including English, French, Korean, Swedish etc.

Selected works

Awards

References

1. Published by University of Washington Press.

2. Published by Curbstone Press, USA.

External links

Ho Anh Thai:

Behind the Red Mist:

The Women on the Island:

Apocalypse Hotel:

Some short stories:

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Raising the Cause of the Individual in the New Vietnam. 2001-09-18. Los Angeles Times. en-US. 2019-12-22.
  2. Web site: Behind the Red Mist. archive.nytimes.com. 2019-12-22.

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