Duong Thu Huong was born in the Thai Binh province of North Vietnam in 1947.
At the start of the 1980s, she spoke out at official Communist Party events and at congresses of the writers’ organizations, as well as in interviews for various Party publications, criticizing bureaucracy, corruption, and “intellectual cowardice.” A ban of her work was ordered after she published her third novel Nhung Thien Duong Mu (Paradise of the Blind) about the horrors of land reform from 1953.
Since 1991, the novels she has sent abroad for publication Tieu Thuyet Vo De (Novel Without A Name), Luu Ly (Memories of A Pure Spring), Ben Kia Bo Ao Vong, and Chon Vang (No Man’s Land) have all been translated into French and English and published in at least 10 other languages.