Nam Cao

Trần Hữu Trị (29 October 1915 – 30 November 1951), better known by his pen name Nam Cao, was a Vietnamese short story writer, novelist, and journalist. He was associated with the critical realism movement in Vietnamese literature prior to the August Revolution of 1945. Born into a Catholic farming family in Hà Nam Province, Nam Cao worked as a clerk in Saigon and a private schoolteacher in Hanoi before turning to writing. His 1941 short story Chí Phèo, which portrayed rural peasants in the era of French colonial rule, became his best-known work. His fiction from this era focused primarily on two themes: the struggles of poor farmers and the economic insecurity of lower-middle-class intellectuals. Following the 1945 revolution, Nam Cao joined the National Salvation Cultural Association (Hội Văn hóa Cứu quốc) and served as a journalist and war correspondent during the First Indochina War. On 30 November 1951, he was killed by French forces while on a mission in Ninh Bình Province at the age of 36. He was posthumously awarded the Hồ Chí Minh Prize in 1996. His former home and memorial site in Lý Nhân District was recognized as a National Monument of Vietnam in 2023.