Join Khuê Phạm and Juhea Kim for an evening of literary conversation to celebrate the publication of Phạm's novel Brothers and Ghosts in English, translated by Daryl Lindsey and Charles Hawley. Topics to be covered in the discussion include:
- growing up Vietnamese in Germany;
- the long shadow of the Vietnam War;
- the rise of Asian diaspora literature.
Praised by Ocean Vuong as 'A courageous and bold achievement by a bright new voice,’ Brothers and Ghosts, tells the story of Kiều, a young woman in Berlin who knows little about her Vietnamese family’s history until she receives a Facebook message from her estranged uncle in America, telling her that her grandmother is dying. Her father and uncle haven’t spoken since the end of the Vietnam War. One brother supported the Vietcong, while the other sided with the Americans.
When Kiều and her parents travel to America to join the rest of the family in California to open her grandmother’s will, questions relating to their past — to what has been suppressed — resurface and demand to be addressed.
In cooperation with Scribe UK.
Khuê Phạm is an award-winning Vietnamese-German writer. A graduate from Goldsmiths College and the LSE, she freelanced for The Guardian and NPR’s Berlin bureau before becoming an editor at Die Zeit. She was nominated for Germany’s version of the Pulitzer Prize for co-writing an investigation into the 2019 Essex lorry deaths. Her novel Brothers and Ghosts is inspired by the story of her Vietnamese family in Germany, Vietnam and the United States. She is based in Berlin.
website: www.khuepham.de/english
instagram: @pham_fatale
Juhea Kim’s bestselling debut novel Beasts of a Little Land
(Ecco) was named a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and longlisted for the 2024 Yasyana Polyana Prize, Russia’s largest annual literary prize awarded by the Leo Tolstoy Museum-Estate. Published in 13 countries around the world, it is being adapted into a series. Her second novel City of Night Birds will be published in November 2024. She is based in London.
website: www.juheakim.com
instagram: juhea_writesAfrica and the African diaspora.
