Books on immigrant experience recommended by Ocean Vuong

Vietnamese-American poet-writer Ocean Vuong won the T.S Eliot Prize in 2017 for his debut poetry collection 'Night Sky With Exit Wounds'. And his debut novel 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2020. An immigrant himself and the first educated person in his own family, in an interview when NPR asked Vuong to for his book recommendations about immigrant experience, in the US and across the world, these are the books the young writer picked:

Photo: Ocean Vuong/ Instagram

One of V. S. Naipaul’s autobiographical works, 'The Enigma of Arrival' is the story of a young Indian who travels from the Caribbean to post-imperial England and over a period of time finds himself as a writer. "This is to me, it's like the Bible of the immigrant writer," Vuong shares.

Photo: Picador

Qiu Miaojin, a Taiwanese novelist, died by suicide in 1995 at the young age of 26 and left behind her unpublished 'Last Words from Montmartre'. The book tells the story of a relationship between two women through a series of letters. "So this might sound familiar to my own book. I'm truly inspired by Qiu Miaojin. She's a Taiwanese immigrant to Paris," Vuong said about picking this book.

Photo: NYRB Classics

Set in pre-war Indochina, 'The Lover' by Marguerite Duras is a "haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover", reads the book's blurb. Recommending the book, Duras said, "Everyone who has been human from time immemorial has had to make the decision about how to move and escape and make new routes. Duras' The Lover is a perennial classic for me in this theme and others because this is a very unique situation of a failed colonial project."

Photo: Pantheon

Recommending Corral's 'Slow Lightning', Vuong told NPR, "This book particularly is haunted by the immigrant experience on the border. Corral comes from parents who are Mexican immigrants. And there's a sensibility of, what is an American body that comes through migration and great loss?"

Photo: Yale University Press