Monique Truong

Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1968, Monique Truong is the author of two novels. Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), her second novel, is forthcoming. Her first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) was the recipient of a New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, a Bard Fiction Prize, a Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literary Award, an Association for Asian American Studies Poetry/Prose Award, and the Seventh Annual Asian American Literary Award, among other prizes. The Book of Salt was honored as a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, a Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction Book, one of the Village Voice‘s 25 Favorite Books, and one of the Miami Herald‘s Top 10 Book of 2003, among other citations.

Truong has been a writer-in-residence at Bard College, a PEN/Robert Bingham Fellow, and a Princeton University’s Hodder Fellow.

Truong is a contributing co-editor of Watermark: An Anthology of Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose (Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1998). She has also contributed to the New York Times, the Times of London (Saturday Magazine), Gourmet, Condé Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, Men’s Vogue, Real Simple, Allure, Time Magazine (Asia Edition), and many other publications.

Profile photograph by Marion Ettlinger.