André Dao breaks rules and witnesses uncomfortable truths
- Written by Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
André Dao’s debut novel Anam (Penguin Random House) has just won the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, worth A$80,000. This follows its shortlisting for this year’s Miles Franklin Award.
Born in Australia to Vietnamese refugee parents, Dao, who works as a writer, editor and artist in Melbourne, is a deserving winner.
The six winners of this year’s awards share an interest in identity and culture, form and innovation – and resilience and resistance. Together, they illuminate the complexities of the Australian experience.
Anam blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. As Tess Do explained in her review for The Conversation, it started life “as an inquiry into his paternal grandfather’s ten-year detention without trial by the Vietnamese government in 1978, three years after the war ended”.