Nguyen Huy Thiep is one of the most famous and original contemporary writers in Vietnam, the author of more than thirty short stories, about a dozen plays, several screenplays, one novel, and many articles on literary topics... His works are translated and published abroad, repeatedly reprinted at home, always attracting the interest of both readers and critics. From his first publication, he drew attention to himself with a bright personality and over the past fifteen years has generated such a huge flow of responses to his work, which probably did not cause any Vietnamese writer. In Vietnam, they even talk about a certain "magical power" of his prose. In 2001, a voluminous collection of articles by authors from different countries dedicated to the writer's work was published in Hanoi under the title "In Search of Nguyen Huy Thiep". Nguyen Huy Thiep was born in 1950 in Hanoi, where he graduated from high school and then from the History Department of the Hanoi Pedagogical Institute. After graduation, he went to teach in a remote mountainous area in northwestern Vietnam, where he spent ten years. He returned to the capital in the first half of the 1980s. It was a difficult time, and the country was on the verge of change. To support his family, whatever he had to do - work as an artist in a publishing house, sell paper, cut wood... At this time, he began to write. He appeared as a writer just when, apparently, he should have appeared - not earlier and not later, namely, immediately after the proclamation of the so-called "renewal policy"in the country in December 1986. The liberalization of all spheres of life that accompanied this course opened up new opportunities for creativity, created new conditions that also contributed to the renewal of Vietnamese literature. Nguyen Huy Thiep became one of the most striking manifestations of the new things that gradually matured in Vietnamese literature in the last decades of the XX century. After the publication of his first ... Read more