Bio
Ho Anh Thai was born in Hanoi, Vietnam. After graduation from Hanoi University of Diplomacy, he worked as a diplomat abroad, especially in India, Iran and Indonesia.
Fluent in several foreign languages, he earned a Ph.D. in International Studies. He is an Indologist and a visiting lecturer in the University of Washington and other foreign universities.
One of the best-known contemporary novelists in Vietnam, Thai is regarded as a literary phenomenon of the post-war generation.
Some of his early works are the novels Men and Vehicle Run in the Moonlight (1986), The Women on the Island (1986), Behind the Red Mist (1989) and the short story collections The Goat Meat Special (1988), Fragment of a Man (1991), etc.
He was the elected president of Hanoi Writers’ Association from 2000 to 2010.
From the 2000s, his published books became more experimental, playful in language and marked by a wry and sardonic tone that was both much appreciated by his growing readership and also considered controversial. Novels such as The Apocalypse Hotel (2002), Ten and One Nights (2006), RHT is Rat Hunt Team (2011), Erased by the Wind (2012), His Children are Scattered on the Road (2014), Burning Van Gogh (2018), Five Letters of Credence (2019), Hanoi is Cloudy with Lovers’ Rain Sometimes (2023), etc., and short stories collections The Narration of 265 Days (2001), Four Paths to the Fun House (2004), Man is Here and the Sky is There (2013), Slipping from up High (2024), have drawn critical appreciation.
Thai has visited and revisited his literary works on the theme of India. Besides short stories in the early 1990s on India, his novel The Buddha, Savitri and I, was published in 2007. In 2022, he published another novel about ancient India, The Buddha, the Robber Queen and the Spy.
Thai has have over 50 books published and his fiction has been published abroad and translated into languages like English, French, German, Swedish, Korean, etc.
Book Gallery
