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Biography
Vietnamese

Bao Ninh

1952

Bao Ninh is a Vietnamese novelist whose The Sorrow of War (1991) — a semi-autobiographical novel about the Vietnam War told from the North Vietnamese perspective — is widely regarded as the greatest Vietnamese novel about the war and one of the most important war novels of the twentieth century. It was the first Vietnamese novel to be widely read in the West and challenged the American-centric narrative of the conflict.

Past sales0
PeriodContemporary
NationalityVietnamese
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Bao Ninh (b. 18 October 1952) — born Hoàng Ấu Phương — was born in Hanoi. He served in the North Vietnamese Army’s Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred soldiers who went to war with his unit, he was one of ten who survived.

Life and Career

The Sorrow of War (Nỗi buồn chiến tranh, 1991) won the Vietnamese Writers’ Association prize in 1991. The novel follows Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier, from the jungles of the Central Highlands through the fall of Saigon and into the disillusioned post-war period. It is not a triumphalist account of victory but a devastating portrait of loss — loss of friends, loss of love, loss of innocence, loss of meaning.

The novel’s non-linear structure — moving between the war and the present, between memory and fiction — embodies the fragmentation of traumatic memory. Frank Palmos’s English translation (1993, published by Secker & Warburg, later by Vintage) brought the novel to an international audience.

Bao Ninh has published very little since — the experience of writing about the war apparently exhausted his desire to write fiction.

Major Works and Themes

The novel is about the cost of war — not the political cost but the human cost, measured in ruined lives, lost love, and the impossibility of returning to normalcy. Its portrayal of the war from the North Vietnamese perspective was revolutionary for Western readers accustomed to the American narrative.

Key Works

  • The Sorrow of War (1991)

Collecting Bao Ninh

Vietnamese first edition (Nhà xuất bản Hội Nhà văn) is the primary collected form. The English translation The Sorrow of War (1993, Secker & Warburg) brings $15–$40.