Nam Le

Nam Le in autograph session at the Comédie du Livre of Montpellier in France, in 2010. Nam Le (Vietnamese: Lê Nam; born 1978) is a Vietnamese-born Australian writer, who won the Dylan Thomas Prize for his book The Boat, a collection of short stories. His stories have been published in many places including Best Australian Stories 2007, Best New American Voices, Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space and One Story. In 2008 he was named a "5 Under 35" honoree by the National Book Foundation. In 2024 he published his first poetry collection with Knopf, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem.

Early life and education

Nam Le came to Australia from Vietnam with his parents, when he was less than a year old, as a boat refugee. He attended Melbourne Grammar School and the University of Melbourne, from which he graduated with a BA (Hons) and LLB (Hons). His Arts thesis supervisor was the Australian poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe. In the same interview he said that his first writing was poetry.

He returned to Australia in 2008, but is moving to Great Britain to take up a writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia.

Nam Le has said of his Vietnamese heritage and writing that:My relationship with Vietnam is complex. For a long time I vowed I wouldn’t fall into writing ethnic stories, immigrant stories, etc. Then I realized that not only was I working against these expectations (market, self, literary, cultural), I was working against my kneejerk resistance to such expectations. How I see it now is no matter what or where I write about, I feel a responsibility to the subject matter. Not so much to get it right as to do it justice. Having personal history with a subject only complicates this – but not always, nor necessarily, in bad ways. I don’t completely understand my relationship to Vietnam as a writer. This book is a testament to the fact that I’m becoming more and more okay with that.

Style Regarding his style, Nam Le said in an interview that "one of the demarcations is writers that deal primarily with language, the more lyrical minded writers, and writers that are more structurally oriented. I always used to...I started out writing poetry and reading poetry, and so I always knew that that was the side that I was most predisposed to, and so I actually had to be quite careful in these stories to not overdo that impulse, to not throw too many images or indulge too many lyrical flights of fancy." NSW Multicultural Award Mary Gilmore Award —