Pham Thi Hoai (born 1960) wrote her first novel The Crystal Messenger in 1991 and it was banned in Vietnam because of its liberalism, but it was quickly translated into six languages. In 1993 it was awarded the prize for the best foreign novel in Germany (Frankfurt Literaturpreis). Today Pham Thai Hoai lives both in Hanoi and Berlin, where she studied literature in the 1980s. She has translated Kafka, Brecht and Dürrenmatt into Vietnamese. She has also written another novel and a collection of short stories Menu de dimanche (1997), which her French publisher considers a veritable display of poetic resistance.
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