Bảo Ninh

Bảo Ninh was drafted into the North Vietnamese army at seventeen and served for six years, mostly with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade, of whose five hundred soldiers only ten, including himself, survived the war. He worked afterward as a battlefield-remains search-team member and then a journalist, carrying the war's dead with him in both jobs before turning to fiction.

The Sorrow of War, published in Vietnam in 1990 (initially under a different title before reissue as Nỗi buồn chiến tranh), follows Kien, a novelist-veteran, as fragmented memories of combat, loss, and a wartime love affair surface out of order, refusing any redemptive shape to his suffering. Its unflinching bleakness made it deeply controversial at home even as it won acclaim abroad in translation.

Vietnamese authorities restricted its domestic publication for years given its unheroic portrait of a war Hanoi had officially declared a triumph; Bảo Ninh has published comparatively little fiction since, living quietly in Hanoi.