Monique Truong

Monique Truong (born May 13, 1968, in Saigon, South Vietnam) is a Vietnamese American novelist, essayist, and librettist who arrived in the U.S. as a refugee in 1975 and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her notable works include The Book of Salt (2003), which won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, Bard Fiction Prize, Stonewall Book Award, and PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize; Bitter in the Mouth (2010); and The Sweetest Fruits (2019), winner of the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), Princeton Hodder Fellowship (2007), and Dos Passos Prize (2021), among other honors, and her novels explore themes of diaspora, identity, race, and alienation.