Hoai Huong Nguyen was born in 1976 in France to Vietnamese parents. Her name means “remember the country”, in connection with her family’s uprooting. With Vietnamese as her mother tongue, she learnt French at school. She has a PhD in modern literature on “Water in the poetry of Paul Claudel and in that of Chinese and Japanese poets”. She has already published two poetry collections entitled Perfume and Deserts. She currently teaches communications at a University Institute of Technology.

Her first novel, Soft Shadows, was acclaimed by the Prix Marguerite Audoux, the Prix Première (RTBF), the Geneva Book Fair prize, the Prix Lire Élire (North Flanders Libraries for All association), the literary Prix Asie (ADELF) and the Prix Sablet for a first novel.

Under a Burning Sky, published in 2017, is a heartrending ode to the French language and to the redemptive and life-giving power of words. The writer’s adoration of French and of Gérard de Nerval’s poetry would be her sustenance and talisman. It would be her refuge in the midst of the worst atrocities experienced throughout the country, torn apart by war, then by the partition of a bloody Viet Nam.

For the first time, in 2019, Hoai Huong Nguyen delivers an epistolary novel, The Cry at Daybreak. The theme of love – of all loves – impregnates each page and every haiku. She proves to her readers that, like books and rays of hope, love transcends time and space, and survives beyond both distance and death.