Monique Truong

Monique Truong is a Vietnamese American novelist, essayist, and librettist, based in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut novel, THE BOOK OF SALT (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller, New York Times Notable Fiction book, and recipient of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the Bard Fiction Prize, among other honors. Her second novel, BITTER IN THE MOUTH (Random House, 2010), received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and was named a best fiction book of the year by Barnes & Noble and Hudson Booksellers. Her latest novel, THE SWEETEST FRUITS (Viking, 2019) received the John Gardner Fiction Prize and was named a best fiction book of the year by Publishers Weekly. Truong co-edited the groundbreaking anthology WATERMARK: VIETNAMESE AMERICAN POETRY & PROSE (AAWW, 1998) and its forthcoming 25th Anniversary Edition (Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network Series/Texas Tech University Press, 2023).

Recipient of a U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship, Truong was most recently awarded the 2021 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. She is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia Law School.