Dao's debut novel blends memoir, fiction, family history and philosophy in a saga of the Vietnamese diaspora

Described by the Guardian as "a work of unusual power and beauty," André Dao's award-winning novel Anam transforms fragments of childhood memories, audio recordings, government documents and family lore into a moving inquiry into what can and cannot be imagined about another person's life. The unnamed narrator, a former lawyer who embarks on an academic career at Cambridge University, finds himself increasingly haunted by his grandfather's stories of having been detained for 10 years as a "prisoner of conscience" in one of Vietnam's most notorious jails. How to reconcile the small, quiet grandfather he knew with this newly discovered family history? How possible is it to know, much less seek to tell, someone else's story--especially one marked by multiple displacements and a never-ending war? Dao's ambitious efforts to find a meaningful and ethical way of acknowledging the unknowability of personal histories in Anam yields a dazzling work of autofiction.
André Dao is a Melbourne-based writer, editor and artist. His debut novel, Anam, won the 2021 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and the 2024 Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction.