Hien Nguyen is a speculative fiction writer who hails from the Midwest. By day she is a social science researcher and by night she writes about Vietnamese ghosts, monsters, and mythology.
Nguyen is interested in the uplifting and haunting forms of human connection, and how SFF writing can lay those bare.
Twin Tides is her debut novel.
Recently I asked Nguyen about what she was reading. Her reply:
I am currently reading The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee. In it, we follow Alice Chow, a single mother struggling to juggle the delicate balance (or imbalance) of her life. A haunting intergenerational tale that is as heartVisit Hien Nguyen's website.wrenching as it is unnerving, it interrogates the legacies and violence the women in her family have inherited. I find myself drawn to horror by Asian women and other writers of color, in particular when the ghosts or monsters become manifestations of the violence inflicted on the colonized or feminine body. It seems to me horror has become a perfect genre to explore all the nuances of these types of inheritances—the incorporeal or horrific is a vessel that can take on as many forms as needed to tell a story that lives beyond the scope of a single generation.
--Marshal Zeringue
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