Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet, essayist, and novelist.
Life and Career
Ocean Vuong was born on 14 October 1988 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Vuong and his family emigrated from Vietnam to Hartford, Connecticut, U.S., when he was two years old, after spending more than a year in a refugee camp in the Philippines. He started learning English at the age of eleven. After graduating from high school, Vuong enrolled at nearby Manchester Community College and then transferred to Pace University in New York City, intending to study international marketing. However, he dropped out to attend Brooklyn College, where he received a B.A. in 19th-century American literature in 2012. He received his M.F.A. in poetry from New York University (NYU).
Vuong is a recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize for his poetry. His debut novel, “On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous”, was published in 2019. He received a MacArthur Grant the same year.
Award and Legacy
His debut poetry collection, “Night Sky with Exit Wounds”, was one of the New York Times Critics’ Top Books of 2016. It earned him a series of prestigious awards such as the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Thom Gunn Award, the Whiting Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
His debut novel, “On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous”, continued to earn him many of the first literary awards in his career such as the American Book Awards, the Ferro-Grumley Award, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature, the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and the New England Book Award for Fiction.
In 2014, Vuong was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.
Vuong’s work continues to inspire readers and writers around the world. His exploration of identity and the immigrant experience in his works has been particularly impactful.
In 2015, he was named by BuzzFeed as one of the “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and selected by Foreign Policy as a “2016 100 Leading Global Thinker” alongside Hillary Clinton, Ban Ki-moon, and Angela Merkel.
