Site Search

Photo by Haruka Sakaguchi

Monique Truong

Photo by Haruka Sakaguchi

Monique Truong is the author of the novel The Sweetest Fruits (Viking Books, 2019), winner of the 2020 John Gardner Fiction Award and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice; and Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), which received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and was named a 25 Best Fiction Books by Barnes & Noble, a 10 Best Fiction Books by Hudson Booksellers, and the adult fiction Honor Book by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association

Her first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller and the recipient of numerous awards including the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, Bard Fiction Prize, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship for Writers, Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literary Award, Association for Asian American Studies Poetry/Prose Award, and an Asian American Literary Award.

Truong also is the co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition (DVAN Series, Texas Tech University Press, 2023) and editor of Vom Lasterleben am Kai (C.H. Beck, 2017), a collection of reportage by Lafcadio Hearn, a.k.a. Koizumi Yakumo, the writer who is the subject of The Sweetest Fruits.

A Guggenheim Fellow, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellow in Tokyo, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellow, Visiting Writer at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College (CUNY), and Agnes Scott College's Kirk Writer-in-Residence, Truong is also an intellectual property attorney. Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Residencies
  • 2001