Kim Thúy

Kim Thúy (2010)

Kim Thúy (born September 19, 1968 , Saigon , Vietnam ) is a Canadian French-language writer .

Life

Kim Thúy spent the first ten years of her life in Vietnam before she fled to Canada as boat people in 1978 with her parents and two brothers and settled in Montreal in the province of Québec . Here Thúy began her studies at the Université de Montréal in law (graduated in 1993) as well as in linguistics and translation, which she graduated in 1990. She worked as a translator and lawyer and was a restaurateur and gastro critic for radio and television.

Her first book Ru (2009) - the title means “lullaby” in Vietnamese and “brooklet” in French - was an international success and earned her numerous prizes. It was published in German in a translation by Andrea Alvermann and Brigitte Große under the title Der Klang der Fremde , published by Antje Kunstmann . In this associatively narrated autobiographical work, she describes her experiences as a child of a wealthy family in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, the displacement and flight, the horror in a Malaysian refugee camp and finally her arrival in the wonderland Canada, which then does not turn out to be quite like that proved wonderful. In a sensual, pictorial language, she repeatedly juxtaposes the two worlds, without bitterness and with a lot of humor.

In 2011 she published together with the French-Slovak-Swiss author Pascal Janovjak À toi . The work is the result of a conversation across linguistic and cultural boundaries - about what defines the beauty of the world and the vulnerability of people.

In 2013 Thúy's book mãn was published by her Canadian publisher “Libre Expression”. It is the autobiographical love story of a woman, first of all about the three women who gave birth, took in and raised her under sometimes adverse circumstances, and finally about the man she met in the Canadian snowstorm.

Vi , published in 2016, continues the great story that began with Ru and Mãn . The autobiographically inspired heroine is officially returning to Vietnam from Canada, which raises many questions: "What is home, what does foreigner mean, how does something familiar become foreign and how does the foreign become familiar?" The book is also a meditation on love, theirs different types it declined, hence the title of the German edition: The many names of love .

Kim Thúy lives in Montréal with her husband and two children.

Awards

2010

• Governor General's Award for Fiction in French
• Prix ​​des cinq continents de la francophonie
• Grand Prix of the Montréal Book Fair
• Grand prix RTL-Lire, Paris Book Fair

2011

• Grand prix littéraire Archambault, for Ru
• Premio Mondello per la Multiculturalitá, for Riva (Italian barrel from Ru )

2015

• Ordre national du Québec

2017

• Doctor honoris causa from the Université de Concordia

Publications

• Ru. Libre Expression, Montréal 2009 ISBN 978-2-7648-0463-6
  • The sound of the stranger. Translator Andrea Alvermann, Brigitte Große. Antje Kunstmann, Munich 2010 ISBN 978-3-88897-679-7
    • Audio book, read by Marit Beyer, BONNEVOICE Hörbuchverlag, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-945095-13-3
  • Ulrike C. Lange: "Ru." Pedagogical dossier. Klett Sprachen, Stuttgart 2014 ISBN 9783125973657 (table of contents at German National Library )
• À toi. (with Pascal Janovjak). Libre Expression, Montréal 2011 ISBN 978-2-7648-0559-6
• Mãn. Libre Expression, Montréal 2013 ISBN 978-2-7648-0497-1
  • The taste of longing. Translator Andrea Alvermann, Brigitte Große. Antje Kunstmann, Munich 2014 ISBN 978-3-88897-928-6
• Vi. Libre Expression, Montréal 2016; Liana Levi, Paris ISBN 978-2-867468315
  • The many names of love. Translator Andrea Alvermann, Brigitte Große . Antje Kunstmann, Munich 2017 ISBN 978-3-95614-168-3

literature

• Sothea Chhum: La figure du réfugié dans la littérature de la diaspora vietnamienne en Amérique du Nord. Analysis of the premiers romans de Lê Thi Diêm Thúy et de Kim Thúy. Diss. Phil. Université de Montréal 2016 online
• Pamela V. Sing: A gentle power , in Ten Canadian writers in context. Ed. Curtis Gillespie, Marie J. Carrière, Jason Purcell. University of Alberta Press, Edmonton 2016, pp. 179-194 (with excerpt from Ru , pp. 189-194). Can be viewed in Google books

Web links

• Short biography and reviews of works by Kim Thúy at perlentaucher.de
• The author at the Université de Montréal
• mãn. on: editions-libreexpression.com (French)
• Reading and discussion in the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, March 16, 2017
• Margrit Irgang : "The many names of love". Book review on SWR2

notes

1. ↑ in French
2. ↑ Presentation ( memento of the original from October 14, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. by book and author by the University of Montréal, by Dominique Nancy (in French)