Vietnam & France (b. 1963).

Writes in French.

Linda Lê is a French writer of Vietnamese descent. Born to a Vietnamese father and a French mother, Lê spent the bulk of her childhood in Đà Lạt. Her mother, a naturalized French citizen, was the one who instilled in Lê a love and appreciation for the French language at an early age. In 1977, two years after the fall of Sài Gòn to North-Vietnamese communists, Lê, along with her mother and sisters, left for and settled down in France, where Lê’s passion for the French written word blossomed. Her father, however, was left behind in Vietnam. In 1981, Lê moved to Paris to pursue her education at the prestigious lycée Henri-IV, then the Sorbonne. She released her debut novel, Un si tendre vampire, in 1986.

News from Vietnam of the death of her father in 1995 profoundly destabilized the young author’s life. Lê published Les Trois Parques in 1997 – the first installment of a “Vietnamese trilogy” which also included Voix (1998) and Lettre Morte (1999) – as a means of coming to terms with the guilt and self-hatred that ensued not only from her father’s death, but also the loss of Vietnam, her childhood home. In an interview with L’Express, Lê refers to her relationship with Vietnam as “carrying a dead body,” more precisely “a dead twin” or “infant”¹. More or less all of Lê’s works grapples with this complicated relationship. Lê won le Prix Fénéon for Les Trois Parques in 1997, le Prix Wepler for Cronos in 2010, and her novel Lame de Fond was pre-selected for le Prix Goncourt in 2012.