Caroline Vu


Caroline Vu is a Canadian novelist of Vietnamese heritage.

Early life and education

Vu was born in 1959 in Dalat, Vietnam and grew up in Saigon. At the age of eleven, she immigrated with her mother and brother to Connecticut where her mother worked on as a resident physician. At the age of thirteen, the family relocated to Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Career

Vu's writings deal with issues of identity and memory, and immigration from Asia to Canada. Her first novel, Palawan Story, was published by the Deux Voiliers Publishing collective in 2014. It won the 2016 Fred Kerner Book Award for the best book by a member of the Canadian Authors Association. It was a finalist for the 2014 Concordia University First Book Prize awarded by the Quebec Writers' Federation. Palawan Story was translated and published in French by Les Éditions de la Pleine Lune in August 2017.
Vu's second novel, That Summer in Provincetown, was published in 2015 in English by Guernica Editions. In 2016, Les Éditions de la Pleine Lune published the French translation, Un été à Provincetown. It is about three generations of a Vietnamese family who immigrate from Vietnam to Canada.

Personal life

Vu practices medicine in Montreal, where she lives with her two daughters. She is the widow of Mario Laguë, a former Canadian ambassador to Costa Rica and the director of communications to Michael Ignatieff, the former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.