Saoirse Nguyễn is a Vietnamese Irish writer and translator based in Cork. Born in Limerick in 1989 to a Vietnamese engineer and an Irish nurse, she grew up shuttling between the Shannon and Hải Phòng, where her grandmother kept a sewing table under a window the color of oxidized copper. She studied conservation and material culture at Trinity College Dublin and completed an MA in literary translation at Queen’s University Belfast before training in textile preservation at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology.
Her fiction and essays have appeared in Granta, The Stinging Fly, and Asia Literary Review, and her debut story collection, Salt Dyes the Hem, won the Mairtín Crawford Award for fiction. As a translator, she has brought Vietnamese short stories to English in the anthology River Mouths, and her essay on diasporic craft traditions received the Hennessy New Irish Writing prize. When not writing, Saoirse Nguyễn consults on heritage projects across Munster and northern Vietnam, teaches community workshops on mending and repair, and is at work on a translation of a midcentury Hải Phòng poet. She lives with her partner and a terrier named Bobbin.
