Scribner Australia is thrilled to announce the publication of 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem - an explosive, devastating debut book of poetry from the acclaimed author of The Boat. Publishing Director Ben Ball acquired ANZ rights from Fiona Baird at WME Agency, for publication in March 2024, alongside Knopf in the USA and Canongate in the UK.

In his first international release since the award-winning, best-selling The Boat, Nam Le delivers a shot across the bow with a book-length poem that honours every convention of diasporic literature—in a virtuosic array of forms and registers—before shattering the form itself.

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity—and the violence of identity. For Le, a Vietnamese refugee in the West, this means the assumed violence of racism, oppression and historical trauma.

But it also means the violence of that assumption. Of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture or language. And the complex violence—for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this—of language itself.

Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks and camouflages, Le’s poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilizing energy between the personal and political. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.

Le commented on the publication saying, ‘I didn't mean to write this book. But it kept insisting -- even as I was writing other things -- and I came to realise it was the book I needed to write. The book I've been writing my whole life. It's a return to poetry, my first love and discipline, and for me it's a return to first principles. I'm so grateful to Simon & Schuster for taking this creative tack with me, and I'm particularly thrilled to be publishing this book with Ben Ball, who launched my writing career in Australia way back when -- who's launched and stewarded so many books and careers before and since. I feel lucky to have the passion and judgment of Ben and his whole S&S team in support of this book.’

Le’s Australian publisher Ben Ball added: ‘I thought I knew what I was waiting for, these years since The Boat, and I was completely wrong: this bolt of lightning struck instead. Completely electrifying, sharply illuminating, it reveals a whole other dimension to the question. Like The Boat, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem conjures its own terms of engagement, escapes our traps, slips our certainties, runs across the water. Needless to say, it’s an enormous privilege to be involved with the book’s publication and to be working again with someone I love and admire so.’