Nam Le

[3] Nam Le came to Australia from Vietnam with his parents, when he was less than a year old, as a boat refugee.

Nam Le also held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2006, and at Phillips Exeter Academy, in 2007.

He returned to Australia in 2008, but is moving to Great Britain to take up a writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia.

"[5] The book, first published in 2008, comprises seven short stories which take the reader to such places as Colombia, New York City, Iowa, Tehran, Hiroshima, and small-town Australia.

In a conversation with Michael Williams he said about the practice of using a narrator close to "self" in a story: A lot of people presume if I'm writing a narrator who has clear parallels to me, that's just sheer inertia; that there's a natural adaptation from so-called life to so-called text.

But any careful reader or writer would understand how much artifice and contrivance go into making this self-standing and self-contained.

I'm not creating a good enough space for the reader to come in and fully partake in that scene or that language or that line.

Nam Le has said of his Vietnamese heritage and writing that:My relationship with Vietnam is complex.