Vu Hoang Tran (born 1975; Vietnamese name: Trần, Hoàng Vũ) is a Vietnamese American novelist and short story writer. His debut novel, Dragonfish, was published in 2015.

“A familiar noir trope—the missing woman—blooms darkly in Dragonfish as the story of a lost people, a theme that Tran renders exquisitely, rating the book a place on the top shelf of literary thrillers.”

Vu Tranis the author of Dragonfish—a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year—as well as a forthcoming novel, Your Origins. His writing has also appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly, and the New York Times.

Oct 30, 2020 · My fiction primarily concerns the Vietnamese diaspora in America and the ongoing and inherited effects of displacement—specifically its muddling of memory and the self, of domestic and interracial bonds, of the Vietnamese as well as American identity.

Oct 8, 2015 · Vu Tran’s debut novel Dragonfish (W.W. Norton & Co. 2015) is more than a crime novel. It’s a story of displaced Vietnamese refugees who fled after the fall of Saigon and ended up in Las Vegas.

“Vu Tran takes a strikingly poetic and profoundly evocative approach to the conventions of crime fiction in this supple, sensitive, wrenching, and suspenseful tale of exile, loss, risk, violence, and the failure to love.”

Aug 12, 2016 · Starting in 1978 and continuing into the early 1990s, about 800,000 Vietnamese people escaped Vietnam by sea and found refuge in another country. Many thousands did not …

Aug 1, 2015 · Author Vu Tran's debut novel reflects his own experiences escaping Vietnam as a child. He tells NPR he was drawn to crime fiction as a way to dig into the sometimes-untold...

Vu Tran is the author of Dragonfish—a NYT Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year—and a forthcoming novel, Your Origins.

Research Interests: migration narratives, Asian-American literature, crime fiction, gothic literature, the aesthetics of genre fiction, literary adaptation in film and TV. I am a novelist and short story writer and tell stories primarily about the Vietnamese diaspora in America.