André Dao

Nov 11, 2024 | liminalmag.com | André Dao

IAustralia is not real. Nor am I. Put differently, we are both fictions—made-up, imagined. Our status as fictions says little about our moral worth, nor about our effects in the world. Nor about how easily we might be done away with. Terra nullius—the doctrine that this continent was uninhabited, and so available for British settlement—was famously declared a fiction by the High Court. The Court seemed to think that by declaring it a fiction, terra nullius would easily be done away with.

Sep 23, 2024 | overland.org.au | La Trobe |André Dao

Dear Vice Chancellor Theo FarrellAs members of the La Trobe University community, we urge you to take action on what the International Court of Justice has ruled is plausible genocide of the Palestinian people. We write from many lands of First Nations peoples, where sovereignty has not been ceded and the work of building an anti-racist, anti-colonial and more just world is ongoing. The escalating violence and death toll of civilians in Gaza has shocked people of conscience around the world.

Sep 17, 2024 | overland.org.au | André Dao

Speech delivered at the National Library of Australia on 12 September 2024, at the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards:The genesis of Anam came just over twenty years ago, when I was fifteen and stumbled across an Amnesty International newsletter with a photo of my grandfather on the cover. Reading that newsletter, I discovered that Amnesty had adopted my grandfather, Dao Van, as a prisoner of conscience.

Apr 5, 2024 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | André Dao

Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is a book about technique. He announces as much in the title, which echoes Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and Eliot Weinberger’s essay on translating a poem, “19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei”. But where Stevens and Weinberger are concerned with techniques of looking, understanding and appropriating, Le is concerned with techniques of writing – of crafting and of assembling. But crafting and assembling what? A poem.

Mar 14, 2024 | meanjin.com.au | André Dao

What is the relationship between writing—so often a lonely pursuit—and the nation, that slippery idea that is supposed to contain us all? And isn’t there something missing here, something between writing and the nation?