Authors Like Thi Bui

Art Spiegelman

American · Maus (1986, 1991)

Spiegelman was born in Stockholm in 1948 to Polish Jewish survivors of Auschwitz and grew up in New York. Maus records his father's account of the Holocaust and the strained relationship between father and son, with Jews drawn as mice and Nazis as cats. It received a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

Marjane Satrapi

Iranian-French · Persepolis (2000–2003), Embroideries (2003)

Satrapi was born in Iran in 1969 and lives in Paris. Persepolis, drawn in black and white, tells her childhood in Tehran through the 1979 revolution and the war with Iraq, and her teenage years alone in Vienna. She co-directed the animated film, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007.

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Alison Bechdel

American · Fun Home (2006), Are You My Mother? (2012)

Bechdel was born in Pennsylvania in 1960 and drew the long-running strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Fun Home is a graphic memoir about her father, a closeted gay man who ran the family funeral home, and his death; Are You My Mother? turns to her mother. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014.

Joe Sacco

Maltese-American · Palestine (1996), Footnotes in Gaza (2009)

Sacco was born in Malta in 1960 and trained as a journalist. He works as a comics reporter, travelling to places such as the West Bank, Gaza and Bosnia and drawing the interviews he conducts. Palestine won an American Book Award in 1996.

GB Tran

American · Vietnamerica (2011)

Tran is an American cartoonist born to Vietnamese parents. Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey follows his grandparents under French rule, his parents through the Vietnam War and their move to the United States, and his own return trip to Vietnam.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Vietnamese-American · The Sympathizer (2015), Nothing Ever Dies (2016)

Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1971 and came to the United States as a refugee in 1975. The Sympathizer, a novel narrated by a communist spy in the South Vietnamese army, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016; Nothing Ever Dies is a study of how the war is remembered. He and his son Ellison wrote the picture book Chicken of the Sea (2019), illustrated by Bui and her son.

Kim Thúy

Vietnamese-Canadian · Ru (2009), Vi (2016)

Thúy was born in Saigon in 1968 and left Vietnam at ten as one of the boat people. Her family spent four months in a refugee camp in Malaysia before settling in Quebec in 1979. Ru, written in French and told in short fragments, won the Governor General's Award in 2010.

Ocean Vuong

Vietnamese-American · Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

Vuong was born near Saigon in 1988 and came to the United States as a child. His poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2017. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, his first novel, is written as a letter from a son to his mother, who cannot read it.

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Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

South Korean · Grass (2017), The Waiting (2020)

Gendry-Kim was born in South Korea in 1971 and lived in France for many years before returning home. Grass is a graphic biography of Lee Ok-sun, forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army as a girl, drawn in heavy black brushwork; the English edition won a Harvey Award in 2020. The Waiting is about families divided by the Korean War.

Le Ly Hayslip

Vietnamese-American · When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989)

Hayslip was born in 1949 in Ky La, a village near Da Nang, and lived through the war as a peasant girl caught between the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese army before moving to the United States. Her memoir was one of the first by a Vietnamese woman to reach a wide American audience, and Oliver Stone filmed it as Heaven & Earth (1993).