Ocean Vuong
A refugee child who learned to read late became one of America’s most celebrated poets – writing about family, war and queer love.
Ocean Vuong was born in Saigon to a family marked by the Vietnam War; his grandfather was an American soldier. At two he came to the United States with his mother and grandmother after time in a refugee camp in the Philippines, and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, in poverty. His mother worked in nail salons. He did not learn to read until he was eleven.
He studied English literature in New York. His poetry collection “Night Sky with Exit Wounds” (2016) won the T. S. Eliot Prize, one of the most important prizes for poetry in English. In it he wrote about war, migration, his family and his love for men.
His first novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” (2019), is written as a letter from a young gay Vietnamese American to his mother, who cannot read. It tells of violence and tenderness, of first love with a boy in the tobacco fields of Connecticut and of the opioid crisis. The book became an international bestseller, and Vuong received a MacArthur Fellowship.
His second novel, “The Emperor of Gladness”, appeared in 2025. He also teaches creative writing.