Kim Thúy Ly Thanh, CMCQ (born 1968 in Saigon, South Vietnam)[1] is a Vietnamese-born Canadian writer. Kim Thúy was born in Vietnam in 1968. At the age of 10 she left Vietnam along with a wave of refugees commonly referred to in the media as “the boat people” and settled with her family in Quebec, Canada. A graduate in translation and law, she has worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer, and restaurant owner. The author has received many awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2010, and was one of the top 4 finalists of the Alternative Nobel Prize in 2018. Her books have sold more than 850,000 copies around the world and have been translated into 31 languages and distributed across 43 countries and territories. Kim Thúy lives in Montreal where she devotes her time to writing.
Life and career
At the age of ten, Thúy left Vietnam with her parents and two brothers, joining more than one million Vietnamese boat people fleeing the country's communist regime after the fall of Saigon in 1975.[2] Her family arrived at a refugee camp in Malaysia,[3] run by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, where they spent four months[4] before a Canadian delegation selected her parents for refugee status on account of their French-language proficiency.[5] In late 1979, Thúy and her family arrived in Granby, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, and later settled in Montreal.[6]
Thúy earned a bachelor's degree from the Université de Montréal in linguistics and translation (1990), and later earned a law degree from the same school (1993).
[7] In her early career, Thúy worked as a translator and interpreter and was later recruited by the Montreal-based law firm Stikeman Elliott to help with a Vietnam-based project.[8] In this capacity, she returned to Vietnam as one of a group of Canadian experts advising the country's Communist leadership on their tentative steps toward capitalism.[8] She met her husband while working at the same firm, and the couple had their first child while on assignment in Vietnam.[5] Their second child was born after the couple relocated to Bangkok, Thailand on account of her husband's work.[5]
After moving back to Montreal, Thúy opened a restaurant called Ru de Nam,[7] where she introduced modern Vietnamese cuisine to Montrealers.[5] She worked as a restaurateur for five years, after which she dedicated one full year to creative writing, and landed a publishing contract for her first book thanks to a former patron of Ru de Nam.[5]
In 2015, Thúy was one of the recipients of the Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Awards presented by Canadian Immigrant Magazine.[9]
In 2016, Thúy published her third novel, Vi. An English translation, again by Fischman, was published in 2018.[17] The book was named as a longlisted nominee for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize.[18]
^“Kim Thúy”, by Myriam Fontaine, Maude-Emmanuelle Lambert, at the Canadian Encyclopedia; published February 27, 2012; last edited January 18, 2018; retrieved May 28, 2018
