Monique Truong

Monique Truong is a Vietnamese-American novelist and essayist born in Saigon in 1968 who fled with her family to the United States in 1975 as part of the post-war exodus from Vietnam. She grew up in Boyce, Virginia, and Houston, Texas, before going on to study at Yale University and Columbia Law School, where she trained as an intellectual property attorney specializing in the rights of authors and artists.

Truong worked as a lawyer for several years before turning to fiction full time. Her debut novel The Book of Salt, published in 2003, imagines the inner life of Bình, a Vietnamese cook in the Paris household of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas during the 1930s. The novel won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award and the Bard Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for numerous other honors.

Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (2010), follows a young woman in North Carolina who experiences synesthesia, tasting words on her tongue. Her third, The Sweetest Fruits (2019), revisits the life of writer Lafcadio Hearn through the voices of three women who knew him. Across her work, Truong returns to themes of food, language, immigration, and the silences within families.

She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN American Robert Bingham Fellowship, and the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. She has also written essays and libretti, and serves on the boards of the Authors Guild and other literary organizations. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and son.

The name Monique is the French feminine form of Monica, traced back through Late Latin Monica to a probable North African Berber root. Saint Monica of Hippo, mother of Augustine, carried the name into Christian Europe, and modern French speakers softened the ending to Monique. She wears the name as a quiet bridge between continents.