Vu Tran

Vu Tran's first novel, Dragonfish, was a NY Times Notable Book and a SF Chronicle Best Books of the Year. His short fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, and Ploughshares, among many other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Fellowship, and has also been a fiction fellow at Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. Born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his PhD from the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is a criticism columnist for the Virginia Quarterly Review, and is an Associate Professor of Practice in English & Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 2010 and also directed the fiction program and undergraduate studies in creative writing.

Vu can be found at vutranwriter.com

Charitable Organization: Kundiman

Praise

“[A] strong first novel for its risk taking, for its collapsing of genre, for its elegant language and its mediation of a history that is integral to post-1960s American identity yet often ignored…. Above all, Tran’s novel is a refreshing and entertaining story.”
- Chris Abani, New York Times

“A superb debut novel…that takes the noir basics and infuses them with the bitters of loss and isolation peculiar to the refugee and immigrant tale.”
- Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

“[R]ichly satisfying work…. A familiar noir trope―the missing woman―blooms darkly in Dragonfish as the story of a lost people, a theme that Tran renders exquisitely, rating the book a place on the top shelf of literary thrillers.”
- Gerald Bartell, San Francisco Chronicle

“[A] hard-hitting debut novel…. [Suzy is] a mystery no one can solve, particularly the people turning all their efforts in the wrong direction. But while their efforts aren’t fruitful, they’re absorbing. And they speak to the way everyone is a bit of an enigma to other people, no matter how many words they put into the effort to be understood.”
- NPR Books