Duong Thu Huong was born in Vietnam in 1947. At the age of twenty, she led a Communist Youth Brigade sent to the front during the Vietnam War. Of the volunteer group of forty, she was one of only three survivors. A vocal advocate of human rights and democratic reform, Huong was expelled from the Communist Party in 1990 before she was arrested and imprisoned without trial. Though her novels are banned in Vietnam, where she continues to live in internal exile, she remains one of the most popular and controversial writers for Vietnamese readers both at home and abroad. Translators Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong live in Paris. They have also translated Duong Thu Huong's Paradise of the Blind (1993), Novel Without a Name (1995), Memories of a Pure Spring (2000), and Beyond Illusions (2002).
