Yasuko Thanh is an award-winning writer from Vancouver Island and a Creative Writing instructor at the University of Victoria. She won the 2009 Journey Prize for the title story in her collection Floating Like the Dead. Her debut novel, Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains—a historical tale set in Vietnam—won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2016. Her best-selling memoir, Mistakes to Run With, which traces her journey from sex work to literary success, was nominated for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes. Her literary work is profoundly intertwined with social justice themes, aiming to confront existing biases and advocate for significant change. Her most recent novel, To the Bridge, was published by Penguin Random House in 2023. Her next novel, The Falling Maria, is forthcoming with them in 2027.
Some of your writing deals with intense and difficult subject matter. How do you balance that real-life honesty with the artistic need for narrative construction?
I don’t see real-life honesty – or subject matter, or content — and the artistic need for narrative construction – or form — as weights on opposite sides of a scale. I think of form and content as inseparable, growing up with each other, and shaping each other through the process of writing and revising, which includes crossing out every word that isn’t honest.
Has writing ever changed how you remember certain events?
Writing hones how I remember certain events. Part of why I write is to wrestle some aspect of life from the outward flow of time and make it mine – perhaps because I have a bad memory! If memories are butterflies, writing pins them to velvet in a glass display case, and preserves them for the future (but kills them in the process).
What are you currently reading and working on?
I’m reading John Berger’s From A to X: A Story in Letters, a novel dedicated to Ghassan Kanafani, whose short story “Letter from Gaza” may have inspired Berger’s work. Told through letters between a woman and her imprisoned lover, it has me thinking in epistolary terms. That influence is shaping my latest project: a second-person novel that opens with “Know your enemy” and unfolds as a series of emails from a mother to her daughter’s doctor.
LiterASIAN 2026 