Vietnamese-Canadian writer wins Canada's Governor General’s Literary Award

Thuy won the award for her fiction, entitled Ru (in French), which was published in January. Ru means a small stream in French and a lullaby song in Vietnamese. After two weeks of its first edition in France, the novel was reprinted with an additional 5,000 copies, in all 45,000 copies so far.

Ru is written as an autobiography with several short passages recalling what happened during the author’s life.

With a writing style full of femininity, warmth, and good atmosphere, Kim Thuy knows how to influence her readers’ emotions, turning sad to happy, physical to spiritual.

Thuy was granted the 2010 Governor General’s Literary Award at a ceremony in Ottawa, Canada o­n November 25th.

The award honors English and French literature in seven categories: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, children's literature (one each for text and illustration), and translation.

Kim Thuy was born in 1968 in Saigon, and her family moved to Malaysia in 1978 and then settled in Quebec, Canada.

She graduated from the Law Faculty at the University of Montreal in 1993. Before embarking o­n a professional writing career, Kim Thuy had worked as a waitress in a restaurant, a seamstress, an interpreter, a lawyer and a producer.

Although writing and thinking in French, Kim Thuy confided that she still has a good command of Vietnamese because it was the language of her childhood.

BTA (According to laodong