Kim Thúy Ly Thanh, CM CQ (born 1968 in Saigon, South Vietnam)[1] is a Vietnamese-born Canadian writer.

At the age of 10 she left Vietnam along with a wave of refugees commonly referred to in the media as “the boat people” and settled with her family in Quebec, Canada.

At the age of ten, Thúy left Vietnam with her parents and two brothers, joining more than one million Vietnamese boat people fleeing the country's communist regime after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

[7] In her early career, Thúy worked as a translator and interpreter and was later recruited by the Montreal-based law firm Stikeman Elliott to help with a Vietnam-based project.

[8] In this capacity, she returned to Vietnam as one of a group of Canadian experts advising the country's Communist leadership on their tentative steps toward capitalism.