Monique Truong

Monique Truong is the author of the novel The Sweetest Fruits (Viking Books, 2019), winner of the 2020 John Gardner Fiction Award and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice; and Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), which received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and was named a 25 Best Fiction Books by Barnes & Noble, a 10 Best Fiction Books by Hudson Booksellers, and the adult fiction Honor Book by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association

Her first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller and the recipient of numerous awards including the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, Bard Fiction Prize, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship for Writers, Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literary Award, Association for Asian American Studies Poetry/Prose Award, and an Asian American Literary Award.

Truong also is the co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition (DVAN Series, Texas Tech University Press, 2023) and editor of Vom Lasterleben am Kai (C.H. Beck, 2017), a collection of reportage by Lafcadio Hearn, a.k.a. Koizumi Yakumo, the writer who is the subject of The Sweetest Fruits.

A Guggenheim Fellow, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellow in Tokyo, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellow, Visiting Writer at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College (CUNY), and Agnes Scott College's Kirk Writer-in-Residence, Truong is also an intellectual property attorney. Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.