At the age of ten, Thúy left Vietnam with her parents and two brothers, joining more than one million Vietnamese boat people fleeing the country's communist regime after the fall of Saigon in 1975. The Thúys arrived at a refugee camp in Malaysia, run by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, where they spent four months before a Canadian delegation selected her parents for refugee status on account of their French-language proficiency. In late 1979, Thúy and her family arrived in Granby, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, and later settled in Montreal. Thúy earned a bachelor's degree from the Université de Montréal in linguistics and translation, and later earned a law degree from the same school. In her early career, Thúy worked as a translator and interpreter and was later recruited by the Montreal-based law firmStikeman Elliott to help with a Vietnam-based project. In this capacity, she returned to Vietnam as one of a group of Canadian experts advising the country's Communist leadership on their tentative steps toward capitalism. She met her husband while working at the same firm, and the couple had their first child while on assignment in Vietnam. Their second child was born after the couple relocated to Bangkok, Thailand on account of her husband's work. After moving back to Montreal, Thúy opened a restaurant called Ru de Nam, where she introduced modern Vietnamese cuisine to Montrealers. She worked as a restaurateur for five years, after which she dedicated one full year to creative writing, and landed a publishing contract for her first book thanks to a former patron of Ru de Nam. She was nominated for the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018.
Work
Thúy's debut novel Ru won the Governor General's Award for French-language fiction at the 2010 Governor General's Awards. An English edition, translated by Sheila Fischman, was published in 2012. The novel was a shortlisted nominee for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2013 Amazon.ca First Novel Award. The novel won the 2015 edition of Canada Reads, where it was championed by Cameron Bailey. In 2016, Thúy published her third novel, Vi. An English translation, again by Fischman, was published in 2018. The book was named as a longlisted nominee for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
