Nam Le (b. 1978), writer, came to Australia as a baby with his Vietnamese refugee parents. He attended Melbourne Grammar School and graduated in Arts/Law from the University of Melbourne, notably writing his honours thesis, on WH Auden, in rhyming couplets. He worked briefly as a lawyer before moving to the USA to complete a creative writing degree at the renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop. His only book to date, the collection of short stories The Boat (2008), attracted extraordinarily favourable reviews around the world. For it he won the Dylan Thomas Prize, the world's most lucrative literary award for a writer from any country under the age of thirty. The book also won the NSW and Queensland Premiers' Literary Awards and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Credited with reviving publishers' faith in the short story, it was included on many local and international reviewers' 'best books' lists for 2008 and 2009 and has been translated into fourteen languages. A contributor to and former fiction editor of the Harvard Review, Le is in high demand for writers' festivals and literary events. Enthusiasts yearn for a second Nam Le book but Stephen Romei in the Australian wrote in 2014 that 'if all Le ever publishes is The Boat he'll still be a star'.
