Vaan Nguyen

Vaan Nguyen was born in 1982 in Ashkelon, Israel and raised in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv.  Her debut collection The Truffle Eye received an enthusiastic reception when it appeared as a print and digital chapbook in 2008. Roy Chicky Arad, who published Nguyen’s early poems in the literary journal Ma’ayan, described her work as “eel-like, elusive, shimmering” in Ha’aretz. In a review titled “The Critic in Love” in Ma’ariv, Menachem Ben, a prominent literary and cultural critic, situated Nguyen’s work among the luminaries of Israeli literature.  “Not since Yona Wallach in the sixties, seventies, and eighties have we witnessed such a phenomenon – a poet whose first book positions her at the center of Israeli poetry.”

Many early reviews of Nguyen’s work, including Ben’s, emphasized her cultural background as the daughter of refugees of the Vietnam War. By contrast, the late critic Tali Latowicki highlighted poems that demonstrated Nguyen’s inventive and surprising poetic language and forms. “In [Vaan Nguyen’s] rich Hebrew, there is an enviable lack of stereotypes and linguistic and cultural fixations,” wrote Latowicki. “On the musical level, her ear picks up the most striking and inviting combinations, though hallucinatory from a semantic perspective.”