'The Boat raises the bar for Australian writing.'
PETER CRAVEN, Heat

'Nam Le is . . . a disturber of the peace.

'Consider the subjects of his stories: a child assassin in Colombia ('Cartagena'), an ageing New York artist desperate for a reconciliation with his daughter ('Meeting Elise'), a boy's coming of age in a rough Victorian fishing town ('Halflead Bay'), before the first atomic bomb falls in Japan ('Hiroshima'), The suffocations of theocracy in Iran ('Tehran Calling'). This astonishing range is topped and tailed by accounts of the uneasy reunion of a young Vietnamese writer in America with his ex-soldier father, and by the title story – the escape of a group of exhausted refugees from the Vietcong in a wallowing boat.

Awards:

- Dylan Thomas Prize (UK) 2009 - Winner Fiction
- Commonwealth Writers' Prize Regional 2009 - Long-listed Best First Book
- SMH Young Novelist 2009 - Winner
- NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2009 - Winner Book of the Year
- NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2009 - Winner New Writing
- Australian Book Industry Awards 2009 - Short-listed Book of the Year
- Australian Book Industry Awards 2009 - Short-listed Literary Fiction
- Australian Book Industry Awards 2009 - Winner Newcomer of the Year
- Qld Premier's Literary Award 2009 - Winner Australian Short Story Collection - Arts Queensland
- Qld Premier's Literary Award 2009 - Short-listed Fiction
- Victorian Premier's Literary Award 2009 - Short-listed Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction
- Prime Minister's Literary Award 2009 - WINNER

About The Author

Nam Le's first book, The Boat, received the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize (Best Writing Award), the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award, among other honours. It was selected as a New York Times Notable Book and Editor's Choice, the best debut of 2008 by the Australian Book Review and New York Magazine, and a book of the year by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Herald Sun, The Monthly, and numerous sources around the world. The Boat has been translated into thirteen languages and its stories widely anthologised. Le is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.