Nam Le: 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

Join author and poet Nam Le as he discusses his book 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. Image: National Library of Australia.

Join author and poet Nam Le as he discusses his book 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem with local Canberra author and Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival, Beejay Silcox.

Tickets cost $25 per general admission, $22 per concession and National Library Friends members. Following the discussion in the Theatre, Nam Le will be available for book signings in the Foyer.

This event is presented in partnership with the Canberra Writers Festival and Red Room Poetry.

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, says Le, a Vietnamese refugee to Australia, is ‘the book I needed to write. The book I’ve been writing my whole life’. This book-length poem is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity and the violence of identity, embedded with racism, oppression and historical trauma. But it also addresses the violence in those assumptions – of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture or language. And the complex violence, for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this, of language itself.

Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks and camouflages, Le’s poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilising energy between the personal and political, honouring every convention of diasporic literature – in a virtuosic array of forms and registers – before shattering the form itself. Like The Boat, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem conjures its own terms of engagement, escapes our traps, slips our certainties. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.

Nam Le’s work encompasses fiction, non-fiction, poetry and screen. Le’s debut poetry collection 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem was published in March 2024 in Australia, the U.S. and U.K. Poems from it were published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic, BOMB, Lana Turner, HEAT and elsewhere.

Le’s work has been translated into over 14 languages and has received major awards in America, Europe and Australia, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature and the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship. Le’s work has appeared in modern classics series and is widely anthologised and taught.

Beejay Silcox is a writer, literary critic and the Artistic Director of Canberra Writers Festival. Her book reviews and cultural commentary regularly appear in national arts publications and are increasingly finding an international audience. Beejay has stories to tell. She eloped to Las Vegas and drove to Timbuktu in a car held together with a bra strap.

Buy the 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem Book.

The Details

What: Nam Le: 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
When: Thursday 1 August 2024, 6 pm – 7:30 pm
Where: Theatre Lower Ground 1 – National Library of Australia
Cost: $25 general admission, $22 concession, National Library Friends members fee. Buy tickets here.