André Dao
André Dao is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Award. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. André was awarded the 2024 Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism for essays published in The Saturday Paper, Meanjin and Liminal. He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, the award-winning oral history project documenting the stories of the adults and children who have been detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum in Australia. His work for Behind the Wire includes a Quill award winning article for The Saturday Paper, and the Walkley Award-winning podcast, The Messenger. He co-edited Behind the Wire’s collection of literary oral histories They Cannot Take the Sky. He is also a member of the Manus Recording Project Collective, whose work has been exhibited in the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne and the City Gallery, Wellington.
books
Anam
Described by The Guardian as “a work of unusual power and beauty,” André Dao’s award-
winning novel Anam transforms fragments of childhood memories, audio recordings,
government documents, and family lore into a moving inquiry into what can and cannot be
imagined about another person’s life. The unnamed narrator, a former lawyer who
embarks on an academic career at Cambridge University, finds himself increasingly
haunted by his grandfather’s stories of having been detained for ten years as a “prisoner of
conscience” in one of Vietnam’s most notorious jails. How to reconcile the small, quiet
grandfather he knew with this long repressed family history? How possible is it to know,
much less seek to tell, someone else’s story—especially one marked by multiple
displacements and a never-ending war? Dao’s ambitious efforts to find a meaningful and
ethical way of acknowledging the unknowability of personal histories in Anam yields a
dazzling work of autofiction that won Australia’s prestigious Prime Minister’s Literary
Award for “extend[ing] the novel form, breaking rules, forming new ones, and witnessing
uncomfortable truths.”
praise
“André Dao’s immersive novel shows that history ripples through the body, through one’s emotions, through the reflections in the waters of one’s own soul. The past flows through the present, and in the globe-spanning Anam, Dao follows these currents with great precision and subtlety. He explores how genealogy is not only a matter of blood but of the ideas, obligations, and politics that connect us to those who have gone before and those who come after. A powerful achievement.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
“André Dao shatters the diasporic novel and brilliantly reconfigures it. History, lore, memory, and the wish fulfilment of the imagination converge to create not one story, like a static jigsaw puzzle, but a sequence of possible stories, each a sublime mirage, beckoning, wavering, and unexpectedly revealing.” —Monique Truong, The Book of Salt
“Anam is a hypnotic narrative of brutality and spirituality. It jumps across time, spinning stories around places, cultures and personal histories. This recalling to life comes with an exuberance, fulfilled only by writing other people’s stories, and in a world as dark as ours, this book is a welcome candle in the window. André Dao is an ethical story-teller. This is a liberating, brave and optimistic engagement with those who have been broken under the wheel of terror and neglect.” —Brian Castro, Shanghai Dancing
“A good book lingers and, for me, affirms any curious return to its pages. Anam, the story of a grandson’s desire to make sense of his family’s past and his grandfather’s long imprisonment, is just this. The prose is meditative, recursive and serpentine. It is a work that wrestles with its own form and, like the best literature, escapes easy definition.” —Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow
“André Dao’s Anam is an original and compelling exploration of histories full of trauma and exile. Anam is an intimate examination of the migrant experience and its vulnerabilities, where the idea of one’s country remains suffused with uncertainty and ambiguity. Dao extends the novel form, breaking rules, forming new ones, and demonstrating how the ‘imaginative power of a novel’ is perfect for witnessing uncomfortable truths. While offering reflections on philosophy, history, language and memory, Anam is primarily a story of family relationships. Lovingly domestic in parts, boldly theoretical in others, for a country full of migrants, living amid unresolved questions of place and belonging,Anam is a profoundly relevant novel.” —Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, Judge’s comments
“Subverting the form of the memoir Dao has created a rich, unique and intellectually rewarding novel. At the heart of Anam is the remembrance of things, but what will remain with the reader is its rare tenderness. The judges chose Anam for the Glenda Adams Award, from a very strong shortlist, because of its literary sophistication and Dao’s preparedness to take risks. Anam pushes the novel form in new and exciting directions. Dao trusts his reader to meet the challenges he sets, and in so doing we are richly rewarded.” —Judges, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards
“Dao combines philosophy, fiction and history to great effect. Moving back and forth in time and place (from Melbourne to Cambridge, Paris and Hanoi), he interweaves the family’s recollections with imagined scenes, fragments of official documents, recorded interviews and research, while acknowledging the impossibility of writing a definitive version of the past. That is the slippery nature of memory, Dao concludes, in this extraordinary work of autofiction.” —Lucy Popescu, The Observer
“Sometimes a book quiets you from the first page: you’re struck by a calm, silver intelligence and intensity of thought. In this novel – which branches gracefully into memoir, essay and something beyond – Dao, or a young father very like him, riddles over the history of his family. At the centre is the story of his grandfather, a political prisoner in Vietnam’s Chí Hòa. From there, he can begin to comb through the claims of loss and memory; of duty and of love. This beautiful, difficult book is about waiting and what inheritances you might dare to claim. Dao has poured everything into it and the result is something exceptional.” —Imogen Dewey, The Guardian, Best Books of 2023