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Amnesty Book Club presents Vinh Nguyen
Join Amnesty International’s Book Club for a live online event for World Refugee Day with Vinh Nguyen, Canadian author of the memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse, in conversation with host Pacinthe Mattar.
Register for the free Zoom presentation
With the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war in Vietnam ended, but the refugee crisis was only beginning. Among the millions of people who fled Vietnam by boat was Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished.
Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for answers. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above sunken truths. To find his father—and anchor himself in the present—Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for years in broken hearts and guarded silences.
Vinh Nguyen is a nonfiction editor at The New Quarterly, curating an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing. He is the co-editor of the academic books Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada and The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, and the author of Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. His writing has been short-listed for a National Magazine Award and has received the John Charles Polanyi Prize in Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction for emerging LGBTQ writers.
Pacinthe Mattar is an award-winning journalist, writer and producer. Her work, featured on CBC News, and in The Walrus, the Toronto Star, Al Jazeera, Buzzfeed, Chatelaine and more, centres the lived experiences that are too often excluded from the mainstream.