Yasuko Thanh
Yasuko Thanh is a novelist and short story writer. Her story collection Floating Like the Dead was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and was named a Quill & Quire Best Book of the Year. Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains, her debut novel, won the 2016 Rogers’ Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, and was nominated for the Amazon First Novel Award. Her memoir Mistakes to Run With was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes in the 2020 BC and Yukon Book Prizes. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
Writers & Books
Videos
Yasuko Thanh on her award-winning novel "Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains"
Award History
2016 - Winner
Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
forMysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains
Jury Citation
“Straining under the colonial rule of the French at the turn of the twentieth century, Vietnam is rife with corruption, oppression, opium dens, and revolutionary cells, and an active guillotine dominates a Saigon square. With compelling narrative drive, Yasuko Thanh imbues Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains with atmosphere and resonance, and creates mesmerizing characters who undergo complex change — politically, socially, personally, sexually — as they are gathered into a vortex of intrigue and risk. The author is as fearless and as wise in reshaping the mystique of the revolutionary as she is in delineating a dramatic time and place in this elegant and tantalizing novel.” — 2016 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Jury (Lauren B. Davis, Trevor Ferguson, and Pasha Malla)Jury Citation
“Using artfully simple language, Yasuko Thanh has crafted a story of powerfully resonant emotion with tremendous restraint – a gift that respects both her characters and her readers.”
Juror History
Works Recognized by WT