Nam Le wins Book of the Year at 2025 NSW Literary Awards for 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

Australia Broadcast Center

19-05-2025

Nam Le has won the top prize at the NSW Literary Awards for his debut collection of poetry — and his second book — 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem.
It's his second Book of the Year win at the event formerly known as the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, after his short story collection The Boat won in 2009.
At this year's event at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, the Vietnamese Australian author also won the $30,000 Multicultural NSW Award, taking his total winnings to $40,000.
The judges described the collection as "damning, frank and unwavering … passionate and bold in its depiction of otherness, trauma and struggle".
Le told ABC Arts he's "stoked" to have won at the NSW Literary Awards.
Accepting the Multicultural NSW Award via video message, Le — who came to Australia as a refugee from Vietnam when he was less than a year old — dedicated the award to his dad, "whose whole life has been an engine of multiculturalism in this country".
Le's publisher Ben Ball accepted Book of the Year on his behalf, reading a prepared speech from Le, in which he asked whether multiculturalism has become "complacent".
"If we think about the horror in Gaza — and how can we not — and how it has affected us here, perhaps we need new questions like: should the goal of multiculturalism be co-existence or cohesion?" Le wrote.
"What good is harmony if it only and always exists on terms dictated by power? … What good is diversity if it recognises every group's difference but not every group's dignity?
"When [diversity] doesn't challenge or threaten power, then how is it more than mere colourwash?"
Le told ABC Arts the response to his newest book has been "warming" — especially among other writers from marginalised backgrounds.
Other winners at the 2025 NSW Literary Awards — worth a total of $360,000 — include Fiona McFarlane, who won the $40,000 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for her novel of interconnected stories linked to a serial killer, Highway 13; James Bradley, who won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction for his ode to the ocean, Deep Water; and Lebanese Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani who won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for his debut book rock flight, about the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians.
Accepting his award, Hourani described rock flight as a book "about protests, and one that acts as a protest for Palestinian liberation".
"Narratives of occupation, grief and resistance are difficult to capture straightforwardly. I wrote rock flight in order to explore both historical and speculative acts of liberation in Palestine."
In some ways, Le has been working on 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem since he first started writing, giving up his job as a corporate lawyer to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the United States in 2004.
But it was being asked to write a piece for the 25th anniversary reissue of Watermark, an anthology of Vietnamese American writing, in 2021 that spurred him to begin working seriously on the book-length poem.
Le wanted the book to reflect his own "ambiguity and ambivalence" about the idea of a Vietnamese poem.
In [2. Invocative / Apostrophic], he writes:
"Whatever I write is
Vietnamese. I can never not —
You won't let me not —
Lick the leash or bite it."
Le explains: "If [the book] were to represent where I was at and what I was feeling about poetry and identity, culture and language, it would need to be something that was never fixed, always in flux, and always undermined and undermining other certainties.
"What I feel is so contingent and so changeable, so I wanted a field of poems where the poems could actually exert pressure and counterpressure on each other."
It gives his collection of poems a sense of energy and playfulness. It's also a reflection of Le's maturation as a writer — the collection coming 16 years after his highly praised debut, The Boat, which was released when he was just 29 years old.
"As a younger writer, you're wanting to convey authority by having answers; by the carriage of certainty," Le says.
"As you go on and get whacked around by life, you realise not knowing or not being sure of things is not a sign of lesser knowing.
"In fact, asking questions and not being sure, and having the wherewithal to change your mind, or to hold contradictory things in your mind, is a more truthful way of representing what it actually feels like to be around."
While his first taste of success was The Boat, Le's first literary love was poetry.
He grew up reading Francis Turner Palgrave's anthology of English poetry, his Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics, first published in 1861, and picking up books of classic poetry in second-hand bookstores.
It doesn't matter if the poetry he reads was written today or centuries ago.
"Good poetry, almost by definition, is alive," he says. "Whether it's written in really classical, metrical verse forms from hundreds of years ago, or whether it's written in the crucible of now, it speaks to what it sees, but it also speaks to the tradition that's around it."
He describes Australian poetry today as "incredibly eclectic" and "draw[ing] from so many different traditions".
In a country with such a strong migrant population, he says, "we each bring our own matrices of histories and stories and memories and cultural references".
Lebanese Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani — who won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry — finds reading Australian poetry "refreshing", because it speaks to "particular intricacies and nuances of certain movements and communities".
He also appreciates the camaraderie among poets.
"Because the Australian poetry landscape doesn't feel as saturated as other English language scenes, there ends up being a sense of community that translates on the page in a really beautiful and memorable way," he says.
Hourani grew up between the Arab states of the Persian Gulf and Australia, reading the poetry of WB Yeats and later Carol Ann Duffy, the UK's poet laureate from 2009 to 2019.
It was at university that he finally came across poetry similar to the kind he wanted to write.
"I discovered that poetry didn't need to take itself so seriously, even if the subject matter itself was quite grave," he says.
"[Rock flight] was an entertaining book to write because the way that I play with theme and language — while it's distressing and often so violent — it still is kind of tongue-in-cheek and playful."
Hourani began writing his book-length poem rock flight during a COVID lockdown in Melbourne in 2020. In the book, he writes about visiting Palestine for the first time in 2019, when he was 22; and about historical and present-day injustices inflicted on Palestinian people.
"I was figuring out what I could do from a distance," he says. "And what I could do is write and publish within this continent and hope that it will spread to different continents too."
Like Le, Hourani reflects on the limitations of language in his poetry.
"i go to palestine with a new journal
thought i'd write some metaphors
but return with scant pages of
questions and fodder.
the more time i spend with words
the more i realise that they just won't do."
The NSW Literary Awards judges described rock flight as a "rendering of crimes, a guide for survival, and a recognition of the disruptive potential of paper, voice and stone".
Hourani made some of his last changes to the book in October 2023. Since then, more than 53,000 Palestinians — including at least 160 journalists — have been killed in the war in Gaza.
"It feels really distressing to see that this book is being read and shared and even published, when journalists across Palestine and specifically in Gaza have been targeted and killed," he says.
"It has been really confronting seeing that all of my references in the book predate 2023 and yet they still remain as relevant as they are."
He says when he started writing the book he wanted to "advocate for Palestinian liberation to people who might not yet be convinced that's a just thing for us to ask for".
It started as a work of non-fiction, tracing his family's history in the region, including his grandparents escaping war-torn Palestine in 1948.
But he soon realised he could do more with poetry; he could make the book non-linear and tangential, and pepper it with recurring motifs like rocks, flight and contaminated water, all building to a picture of the history of Palestinian struggle.
"It's felt a lot of the time like history has been repeating over again for the better part of a century," he says. "The long-form poem allows it to be one contained story, in the way that this history is one contained story."
Hourani also wanted to write for other Palestinians and allies.
"Palestinian writing in Australia, but also now globally, isn't being given that freedom of expression and that airtime that it deserves and needs," he says.
"I really wanted to utilise the space as much as I could."
He wants his readers to "feel like there is always something to be done, tangibly and materially, to contribute to the struggle".
"A poet could dedicate this time to bearing witness to these atrocities, or they could dedicate the time to recoup and have readers feel re-energised to enter the struggle after a week of awful headlines.
"There is no one answer to what a poet's duty is at a time like this."
Book of the Year ($10,000)
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le (Scribner Australia)
Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000)
Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane (Allen & Unwin)
Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40,000)
Deep Water by James Bradley (Hamish Hamilton Australia)
Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000)
rock flight by Hasib Hourani (Giramondo Publishing)
Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature ($30,000)
Silver Linings by Katrina Nannestad (HarperCollins Publishers)
Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature ($30,000)
Anomaly by Emma Lord (Affirm Press)
Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000)
Three Magpies Perched in a Tree by Glenn Shea (Currency Press/La Mama Theatre)
Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000)
Inside by Charles Williams (Simpatico Films, Macgowan Films, Never Sleep Pictures)
Indigenous Writers' Prize ($30,000)
When the World Was Soft by Juluwarlu Group Aboriginal Corporation (Allen & Unwin)
Multicultural NSW Award ($30,000)
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le (Scribner Australia)
UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($10,000)
Jilya by Dr Tracy Westerman (UQP)
Translation Prize ($30,000)
The Trial of Anna Thalberg by Eduardo Sangarcía, translated from Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer (Restless Books)
Special Award
Liminal
University of Sydney People's Choice Award ($5,000)
The Lasting Harm by Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Allen & Unwin)