Y Ban receives top prize at the Việt Nam Writers Association Awards 2024. Photos courtesy of thethaovanhoa.vn

Writer Y Ban's short story collection Trên Đỉnh Giời (On Top of the Sky) won the top prize at the Việt Nam Writers Association Awards 2024. The collection was also one of ten literary works honoured in 2024 by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. She spoke about the award and her career.

What can you tell us about your collection of short stories?

Trên Đỉnh Giời is a collection of 18 short stories, of which seven have won awards at competitions. I focus on social issues in the collection. It is extremely variable, possibly continuing from one tradition to another.

I still follow my traditional subject about the fate of a woman or a little girl, but the scope is expanded, problem posing and the endings are always unpredictable, not allowing readers to second guess what will happen.

My writing looks at the changes of the Vietnamese family and also to give warnings, even though they can be extremely painful.

How did you feel when critic Phạm Xuân Thạch praised your work?

I live before I write. So all the things that I have experienced such as the pandemic, natural disasters, enemy attacks, changes in people's hearts, or all the social changes, must be deeply imbedded in my mind. To write good work I must first suffer human pain.

Literature never goes beyond the social process. But today's society has too many temptations.

More than anyone else, writers must be profound with their writing and never stop at being satisfied with what they have achieved.

If I were satisfied with my first award-winning works published in 1989, Bức Thư Gửi Mẹ Âu Cơ (Letter to Mother Âu Cơ) and Người Đàn Bà Có Ma Lực (The Woman with Black Magic), I wouldn't be standing here to receive the 2024 award from the Writers Association.

I'm moved by the critic's comments. He saw my creation from different angles of life with dangerous situations to reveal the terrible problems of human life and get to the bottom of human complexity through the collection.

The award-winning collection comprises of 18 short stories.

Has the development of technology and AI, and all the natural disasters that have occurred, changed how writers approach subjects?

Every piece has a destiny. It resembles a human being, like its author. And when a writer finishes a piece, it does not belong to him or her, nor does it belong to the author's subjective will, but it belongs to readers, to the academic community, and to critics.

Whether it can continue or not, or whether it will be submerged in a black hole or forgotten, we don't know.

In a macro way of thinking, the work already belongs to the history and literature of that nation. Each of us the writers should be calm and write better works. We should remove ego from our work. If we write about ego forever that's very dangerous.

I am very happy to win the prize however, I recognise that after the award, Trên Đỉnh Giời is not mine, it belongs to the reader, to the history and to the nation. That is more important than if the work will be known in next five or ten years.

If a piece falls into oblivion, that is a problem we must think about. We need to put a burden on ourselves and be more responsible for our work.

Not only does it stop at a writer, but critics and researchers also need to be responsible for interacting with that work to bring it to a more worthy level. VNS