Robert Olen Butler

Butler was born in Granite City, Illinois, and drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War, where fluency in Vietnamese led to work as a linguist and counterintelligence officer in Saigon, an experience that gave him lifelong access to Vietnamese language, culture, and exile communities back in the United States.

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992) collects stories narrated entirely in the first person by Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana, their voices ranging from an elderly refugee still loyal to Ho Chi Minh to a woman who believes she has been reincarnated: an unprecedented act of imaginative ventriloquism that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.

He has published more than a dozen further novels and collections and taught creative writing for decades, long based at Florida State University, remaining one of the few American writers of his generation to render the Vietnam War primarily from the Vietnamese side.