During this imprisonment, Thien’s poems which made their way to the West were translated into English by Huỳnh Sanh Thông of Yale University. The work won the International Poetry Award in Rotterdam in 1985. He was adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International in 1986.^[5] Twelve years after bringing his manuscript to the British Embassy, he was released from jail. He lived in Hanoi under close watch by the authorities, but his international following also kept an eye on Thien.

Human Rights Watch honored him in 1995.^[1] That year he was also permitted to emigrate to the United States with the intervention of Noboru Masuoka, a retired Air Force colonel and career military officer who was drafted into the U.S. Army following internment in Heart Mountain camp for Japanese Americans in 1945.

He immediately wrote Hoa Dia Nguc II, poems composed in his memory (as he was not allowed pen and paper in prison) from 1979 to 1988. They were published in bilingual editions (Vietnamese and English) then again in its Vietnamese entirety in 2006.

In 1998 Nguyen Chi Thien was awarded a fellowship from the International Parliament of Writers. He lived in France for three years, writing the Hoa Lo Stories, prose narrative of his experiences in prison. These were translated and published in English as the Hoa Lo / Hanoi Hilton Stories by Yale Southeast Asia Studies in 2007.

Ocean Vuong, “Notebook Fragments”

Bản tin sau đây là trong phần Tin Tổng Hợp của đài RFI trong năm 2020.

Nhà thơ Ocean Vương và một thoáng huy hoàng

Le Monde giới thiệu chân dung một nhà thơ trẻ Mỹ gốc Việt Ocean Vương, 31 tuổi trên trang văn học. Công thức « không có bom đạn = không có gia đình = không có tôi » nói lên tâm trạng và cội nguồn phức tạp của một nhà thơ trẻ Mỹ gốc Việt tự cho là sản phẩm của chiến tranh, tuy sinh năm 1988.

Tâm tình này bàng bạc trong tập thơ On Earth We’re Briefly Georgus, vừa được dịch sang tiếng Pháp, Un Bref instant de Splendeur (Một thoáng huy hoàng). Nhà xuất bản Gallimard phát hành.