Bao Ninh

Bảo Ninh (born 1952) is a Vietnamese novelist and short-story writer whose work is shaped by his own experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War. Born in Hanoi, he joined the North Vietnamese army in 1969 and served with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of approximately five hundred members of the brigade who went to war, he was one of only ten who survived. After the war he studied in Hanoi and later attended the Nguyễn Du Writers’ School. Rather than presenting combat as heroic or ideologically straightforward, Ninh’s writing concentrates on grief, memory, trauma and the psychological burden carried by survivors, giving his fiction a markedly personal and anti-romantic view of war.

His most important work is The Sorrow of War, first published in Vietnam in 1991. The novel follows Kiên, a former North Vietnamese soldier whose memories move repeatedly between his youth, brutal battlefield experiences and his troubled post-war life in Hanoi. Its fragmented structure reflects the way traumatic memories intrude upon the present, while the story also explores Kiên’s lost relationship with his childhood sweetheart Phương and the destruction of an entire generation by war. Drawing heavily upon Ninh’s own experiences, the novel became an international bestseller and won the Independent Foreign Fiction Award in 1994. Ninh has also written numerous short stories about soldiers, civilians and the aftermath of conflict; On the Banks of the Ya Crong Poco River, published separately in English as a Vintage Short, is drawn from The Sorrow of War.