Kim Thúy Ly Thanh

Kim Thúy is a writer. Her books, Ru, Mãn, Vi, Em and À toi, among others, have sold more than 850,000 copies around the world and have been translated into 31 languages and distributed across 43 countries and territories. Thúy has received the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Knight of France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She has been a finalist for the New Academy Prize in Literature (the Alternative Nobel Prize).

She 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.