PRESS RELEASE

NEW BOOK BY NGUYEN CHI THIEN PUBLISHED IN BILINGUAL TEXT

Hai Truyen Tu – Two Prison Life Stories in Vietnamese and English.   170 pages, paperback, $20 USD.  Date of publication:  October 20, 2008.

Nguyen Chi Thien was a political prisoner in Communist North Vietnam for twenty-seven years.  He won the International Poetry prize in 1985 while it was not known if he were alive or dead.  He was in chains at the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ for smuggling his manscript of poems “Hoa Dia Nguc” into the British Embassy in 1979.

This book is excellent for language learning in both directions – English and Vietnamese.  It is suitable for youth who want to learn the true Vietnamese history of surviving the Communist regime by force of will and spirit.  It is suitable for their parents who survived the perilous journey by boats to become refugees who have built their new lives while not forgetting the old one.  It is suitable for students who have grown up in Vietnam under the Communist regime who are denied learning about the intellectual political prisoners of the regime and their literature. 

The editor and publisher is Jean Libby, of Palo Alto, California.  The Vietnamese language and graphics editor is CN Tran Trung Ngoc of San Jose.  An interview of Nguyen Chi Thien by the BBC journalist Bui Van Phu is published in Vietnamese, including the return of his original manuscript from London in 2008. 

The book is available online at Amazon.com. the Vietnamese Canadian Centre in Ottawa (price 20 Canadian dollars), and in Arlington, Virginia, at Canh Nam Press.  Hai Truyen Tu – Two Prison Life Stories by Nguyen Chi Thien is supported by the Australian Vietnamese  Federation and is in stock now in Australia.