Fiction Writer Vu Tran Receives Coveted Honor and $50,000 Prize For Collection of Short Stories on Vietnamese Culture and Immigrant Life

LAS VEGAS—October 29, 2009—Vu Tran, a UNLV graduate and English instructor, received the prestigious 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award for his collection of short stories on Vietnamese culture and immigrant life. The award, given by the Giles Whiting Foundation, is a coveted prize for up-and-coming writers of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and playwriting. Tran, 34, is one of 10 writers to receive the award and a $50,000 prize this year. The Whiting Foundation has recognized young writers since 1985.

Literary scholars describe Tran as a writer whose stories exhibit an inherent feeling of longing in romantic, mysterious and fantastical literary prose.

“There’s a mood of wonderful quietude internally and externally. He is a beautiful writer of English,” said Barbara Bristol, Director of the Writers Program at the Whiting Foundation. “He’s more like a poet than a fiction writer because his work is more fair and dense. He is an old soul.”

“His writing is very poetic and in a sense very romantic because he writes often about longing and desire that in some way can’t overcome obstacles but somehow wants to,” said UNLV English Professor Douglas Unger, who was Tran’s dissertation advisor. “There’s a very charming, poignant and romantic element to his writing.”

Tran was exposed to American culture after leaving Vietnam as a child. However, his mother kept him deeply rooted in his heritage by continually telling stories of life in Vietnam, where tradition, religion and family were intertwined. Tran listened so intently to his mother’s narratives and found them so influential that he knew from an early age he wanted to be a writer and nothing else.

“I feel like getting the Whiting Writers’ award is very much a confirmation of all those years I wanted to do this,” Tran said. “It makes me feel like I am on the right track. All the struggles and uncertainty and hard work were worth it.”

Past Whiting Writers’ Award recipients include: Denis Johnson, Mona Simpson, Tony Kushner, Jorie Graham, Gretel Ehrlich, Michael Cunningham, Alice McDermott, William T. Vollman, Ian Frazier and David Foster Wallace.

Tran received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Tulsa. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Tran was also a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow at UNLV where he graduated with a Ph.D. in English in 2006. Tran currently teaches creative writing, world literature and composition at UNLV, and has secured a publication deal for a crime novel titled “This or any Desert,” which is set in Las Vegas.

The respected literary publication Atlantic Monthly recently took notice of the UNLV English programs in which Tran and other UNLV professors work with the next generation of writers. The magazine honored the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program as one of the five most innovative in the country and the doctoral program in creative writing as one of the top five of its kind.

Eds: For more information, please visit http://www.whitingfoundation.org and http://www.english.unlv.edu.

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UNLV is a doctoral-degree-granting institution of 28,000 students and 3,300 faculty and staff. Founded in 1957, the university offers more than 220 undergraduate, master's and doctoral degree programs. UNLV is located on a 332-acre campus in dynamic Southern Nevada and is classified in the category of Research Universities (high research activity) by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.