This essential book weaves Thien's remarkable life story explicitly into the narrative of modern Vietnamese literature, Dan Duffy, Director, Viet Nam Literature Project. -- --Viet Nam Studies Group November 3008
Together with Nguyen Chi Thien's first edition of prison poems in English, Flowers from Hell/Hoa Dia Nguc (New Haven, CT: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, 1984), translated by the late Huynh Sanh Thong, and his newest publication released in late 2008, Hai Truyen Tu/Two Prison Life Stories: Prose in Bilingual Text (Palo Alto, CA: Nhan Quyen Tai Viet Nam Series No. 1, Allies for Freedom, 2008), the author re-emerges as an iconic dissident writer whose personal history is as complex and vivid as his aesthetics. Professor Mariam Lam, University of California, Riverside --Journal of Vietnamese Studies, February 2009
Together with Nguyen Chi Thien's first edition of prison poems in English, Flowers from Hell/Hoa Dia Nguc (New Haven, CT: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, 1984), translated by the late Huynh Sanh Thong, and his newest publication released in late 2008, Hai Truyen Tu/Two Prison Life Stories: Prose in Bilingual Text (Palo Alto, CA: Nhan Quyen Tai Viet Nam Series No. 1, Allies for Freedom, 2008), the author re-emerges as an iconic dissident writer whose personal history is as complex and vivid as his aesthetics. Professor Mariam Lam, University of California, Riverside --Journal of Vietnamese Studies, February 2009
Together with Nguyen Chi Thien's first edition of prison poems in English, Flowers from Hell/Hoa Dia Nguc (New Haven, CT: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, 1984), translated by the late Huynh Sanh Thong, and his newest publication released in late 2008, Hai Truyen Tu/Two Prison Life Stories: Prose in Bilingual Text (Palo Alto, CA: Nhan Quyen Tai Viet Nam Series No. 1, Allies for Freedom, 2008), the author re-emerges as an iconic dissident writer whose personal history is as complex and vivid as his aesthetics. Professor Mariam Lam, University of California, Riverside --Journal of Vietnamese Studies, February 2009
Together with Nguyen Chi Thien's first edition of prison poems in English, Flowers from Hell/Hoa Dia Nguc (New Haven, CT: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, 1984), translated by the late Huynh Sanh Thong, and his newest publication released in late 2008, Hai Truyen Tu/Two Prison Life Stories: Prose in Bilingual Text (Palo Alto, CA: Nhan Quyen Tai Viet Nam Series No. 1, Allies for Freedom, 2008), the author re-emerges as an iconic dissident writer whose personal history is as complex and vivid as his aesthetics. Professor Mariam Lam, University of California, Riverside --Journal of Vietnamese Studies, February 2009
Together with Nguyen Chi Thien's first edition of prison poems in English, Flowers from Hell/Hoa Dia Nguc (New Haven, CT: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, 1984), translated by the late Huynh Sanh Thong, and his newest publication released in late 2008, Hai Truyen Tu/Two Prison Life Stories: Prose in Bilingual Text (Palo Alto, CA: Nhan Quyen Tai Viet Nam Series No. 1, Allies for Freedom, 2008), the author re-emerges as an iconic dissident writer whose personal history is as complex and vivid as his aesthetics. Professor Mariam Lam, University of California, Riverside --Journal of Vietnamese Studies, February 2009
Nguyen Chi Thien was born in Hanoi in 1939. When Vietnam was partitioned in 1954, all but his brother remained in North Vietnam because of family relationships. He got into trouble frequently as a young man with his anti-government poems. In 1979, during a brief period of release, he wrote all the poems he had composed in his memory down on paper and brought them to the British Embassy in Hanoi. Denied asylum, he was arrested and taken to the Hanoi Central Prison. known as the Hanoi Hilton as named by the captured American flyers imprisoned there during the Vietnam War.
His poems were published via the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, soon recited and translated by Vietnamese university students in the U.S. In 1984 Professor Huynh Sanh Thong at Yale University translated and published the poems in bilingual text Hoa Dia Nguc / Flowers from Hell. This book is still in print by the Yale Southeast Asia Studies Program.Amnesty International adopted Nguyen Chi Thien as one of six Prisoners of Conscience in 1985 and worked with other international organizations to gain his release by the Vietnamese government, which came in November 1991. Still under house arrest and in frail health, Nguyen Chi Thien immigrated to the United States in 1995 under the auspices of the Humanitarian Operation. In 1998 he was awarded a fellowship from the International Parliament of Writers. He went to Paris and wrote the seven prose stories called Hoa Lo, published in Vietnamese in 2001. Translated into English, they were published as the Hoa Lo / Hanoi Hilton Storiesby Yale University Southeast Asia Studies in 2007. He is now fluent in English and became an American citizen in 2004.
