Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai: Dust Child

Born and raised in Việt Nam, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is the author of the international bestseller The Mountains Sing, runner-up for the 2021 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Best Debut Award, the 2021 International Book Awards, the 2021 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for Fiction. She has published twelve books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in Vietnamese and English and has received some of the top literary prizes in Việt Nam. Her writing has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in major publications, including the New York Times. She has a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University. She is an advocate for the rights of disadvantaged groups in Việt Nam and was named by Forbes Vietnam as one of twenty inspiring women of 2021. Dust Child, her second novel, has been named A Most Anticipated Book of the year by many media outlets including Sydney Morning Herald and is being translated into many languages.

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian writer, journalist and critic based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work has been published widely in media and literary publications including The Age, The Guardian, Meanjin and Sydney Review of Books. She was an inaugural recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter fellowship in 2018 and a fiction judge for the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.