André Dao is a Melbourne-based writer, editor and artist. His debut novel, Anam, won the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. His writing has appeared in Meanjin, Sydney Review of Books, The Saturday Paper, Asia Literary Review and elsewhere. In 2015 he was selected as one of the Melbourne Writers Festival’s 30 Best Writers under 30.
A profound meditation on forgiveness and forgetting . . . Dao’s
extraordinary debut novel combines fiction and history to chronicle
his Vietnamese grandparents’ traumatic life.
*The Observer*
Andre Dao’s Anam . . . confirms his status as a young writer to
watch . . . Blending fiction and essay, Anam is about a grandson
trying to learn his family story and explores ideas of home, exile
and identity.
*The Sydney Morning Herald*
This impressive novel illuminates lives that rarely come to the
attention of readers. Braiding fiction, essay, family stories and
history, the result is a profoundly moving remembrance of things
past as well as an invitation to look to the future. There is
kindness and insight on every page.
*Michelle de Kretser, author of Questions of Travel*
Admirable in its scope, Anam melds theory, fiction and essay . . .
which come together for a universal experience of loss and
belonging.
*The Irish Times*
Riveting, wise, transporting, Anam turns its back on the memory
industrial complex and keeps the past unassimilable, both dangerous
and fragile.
*Maria Tumarkin, author of Axiomatic*
Anam is a beautiful book. I loved its hypnotic rhythms, its
restlessness, the way memories, dreams and ideas, like waves, kept
riding in over the top of one another, undoing and complicating
everything. It is the work of a soulful and scrupulous mind.
*Miles Allinson, author of Fever of Animals*
Dao has a mesmeric and unique style that is both brave and
profound, a style that captures the voices of those that may not
always have had one… A magnificent debut.
*The Australian*
André Dao’s ambitious debut… offers something defiant and distinct,
unsentimental yet tender... Nothing in Australian literature has
challenged me in a way that feels so profoundly personal.
*The Saturday Paper*
Anam gently pulls us into a deepening flow of memory… untangling
the endlessly knotted problems of memory, inheritance and home…
Anam is a rigorous and generous book, which will sit with you well
after reading.
*Melbourne Age*
Uncompromising and honest, Anam is a brilliant book of immense
scope…. Original and convincing... in terms of thematic,
linguistic, and cultural scope, Anam is a fine example of what a
global novel should be like. It beautifully connects East and West;
Europe and Australasia; Oceania and the Middle East.
*The Conversation*
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