Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong is a rare case of an author. In 2017, he was awarded the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds. In 2018, before the release of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, more than 15 newspapers and websites had already included it among the most anticipated books of the year. As soon as it was published, it became a bestseller and made the New York Times list. It was named the best book of 2019 by TIME, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, New York Public Library, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and others. Ocean Vuong was born in 1988 in a rice field in Vietnam. At the age of two, his family was forced to leave Vietnam and spent eight months in a refugee camp in the Philippines before immigrating to America. He was the first in his family to learn to read at the age of 11, and 18 years later (in 2017) he received the T.S. Eliot Prize.