Lawyers in the winners’ mix at Literary Awards

His academic research focuses on the intersections between international human rights law, digital technologies and critical theory.

Then, there’s Dao’s commitment to recording and sharing the stories of refugees and those silenced in offshore detention via Behind the Wire, an oral history project he co-founded, which documents people’s experience of mandatory immigration detention that was founded in 2014. He won a Walkley Award for the associated podcast, The Messenger.

But it is his latest accomplishment that has brought Dao together with LSJ.

Upon its publication in May this year, his debut novel Anam won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and now – the cherry on top – the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction.

In shortlisting Dao’s novel, the judges commented, “Anam is an intimate examination of the migrant experience and its vulnerabilities, where the idea of one’s country remains suffused with uncertainty and ambiguity. Dao extends the novel form, breaking rules, forming new ones, and demonstrating how the ‘imaginative power of a novel’ is perfect for witnessing uncomfortable truths … lovingly domestic in parts, boldly theoretical in others, for a country full of migrants, living amid unresolved questions of place and belonging, Anam is a profoundly relevant novel.”

“I’m very honoured to win this award, not least because of the calibre of the shortlisted novels – not to mention other incredible books published in what was a very strong year for Australian literature,” Dao tells LSJ.

“I’m also immensely grateful to the judges, for their time and dedication to literature. I was drawn to the novel form because it is so capacious – because it encourages writers to take risks, to produce something new, which is what I tried to do with Anam, and winning this award feels like recognition of those creative risks.”

After winning numerous awards already, the emotional experience of it hasn’t softened.

“I take every response, whether it’s from judges, reviewers or readers, and it still feels like a gift,” Dao says.

“It took me so long to write this book, and for it to come out. There was a point where I gave up on it being published and I thought I was writing it for myself. Ultimately, [award] judges are readers, too. For me, looking at the judging panel and the calibre of writers and critics makes it really meaningful to me, the recognition from fellow writers is significant.”

Anam cleverly twists a memoir into a compelling narrative that travels through time, place and different voices to depict a world in which identity is a dynamic beast, unanchored by a clear and evident history. The initial intention appears to be Dao’s desire to imagine the reality of his Catholic grandfather, imprisoned by the Vietnamese communist government in Sài Gón’s famous Chí Hòa prison for a decade on account of his refugee status.

Like Anna Funder’s novel-memoir Stasiland more than two decades earlier, Anam combines Dao’s narrative with the imagined past based on the scanty facts and evidence remaining. It transitions between Cambridge, where Dao lives with his partner Lauren and daughter Edith, and Vietnam, France and Australia. It is the people who are left behind who really attract Dao’s attention: his grandmother, uncles and aunts all left without a husband and father and incapable of communicating with him nor knowing if, and when, he will ever be free.

But in delving into the story of his grandfather, Dao is also absent from his own present life with a partner and baby daughter of his own. To ascertain and tell his grandfather’s story is a role he may have been born into as the eldest son of the eldest son: a steward of the family’s stories. His family, displaced between France and Australia, exist in places that are not their home, so Dao dreams up a home for them – an abstract place that multiple generations of his family can exist in at once – Anam. Dao wrestles throughout the book with his right to feel angry, aggrieved, wrought by the injustices delivered upon his family.

His desire to understand and do justice to his grandparents through sharing their story, and contemplating it himself, coexist with a sense of shame at feeling loss and grief for experiences that occurred well before his life began.

“The book is trying to work through what It means to be Australian in the 21^st century from the particular viewpoint of someone who comes from a migrant, refugee background,” Dao says.

“In some ways, anyone who lives on this continent will have questions about what it is to belong here. That would be the thread that links to the book to a wider audience here, with the caveat that it’s from a specific viewpoint.”

For those who have followed Dao’s work over more than a decade, the prestigious, ongoing recognition for his writing acumen will come as no surprise. He has been published in numerous Australian literary journals and has been awarded residencies and fellowships throughout the Asia Pacific region.

Dao’s qualifications and interests in both law and writing have intertwined for a long time. Some people feel like they need to split their day job from their writing, but that’s not a dilemma for the multi-hyphenate academic, author and editor.

“It’s been very organic, and each has transformed my understanding of the other,” he says.

“When I was studying, I thought there was a sharp divide. I thought I was doing law for practical, pragmatic reasons and writing – particularly fiction – was a creative outlet.”

“Through writing I’ve come to see an essential aspect of law is the expressive quality rather than just being regulatory. It expresses deep ideas about what we think justice is and what we think a good life is, and it’s primary mode of expression is words. Law is really connective to writing, and writing fiction isn’t just a form of self-expression. Books, including novels, can be involved in political power in the same way we think that black-letter-law is.”

A lot of Dao’s work, especially his podcast, editing and exhibitions associated with Behind The Wire have been very collaborative, unlike the typical process of writing fiction.

“Sometimes we talk about things as only symbolic,” he says.

“When I was working with people in detention, what they wanted was freedom, but it was so important for the people we spoke to that we gave them space to tell their own stories and histories in their own words. In doing so, it wouldn’t directly change government policy, but it was very significant in opening a space for their voices that was closed off for them.”

Despite Anam being a work of fiction, it is rooted in real voices, real histories, and real lives.

“Some of the techniques I drew on for Anam came directly from the oral history work for Behind The Wire, especially in talking with my grandparents and other members of my family,” he says.

“That said, it is also a very lonely project in the sense that over the 10 years I worked on it, I had to take sole responsibility for it. That was very different to working as a collective, which I was accustomed to. The vision had to be my own, as much as I wanted to bring other voices in.”

The process of writing Anam, a decade in the making, coincided with Dao’s PhD, and rather than a juggling act, he found that both commitments nourished the other. As he endeavours to write his current novel, the territory is a different one this time.

“I’m a postdoctoral research fellow at Melbourne Law School, working on a large research project that is essentially about global corporate power and the history of that and colonialism,” he says.

“Before that, I was doing a PhD there, which coincided with the last few years of working on Anam. Strangely, a PhD and finishing – slowly – the writing of a novel went together quite well. For a lot of other people who have to be in a workplace at certain times, the life of a PhD student is busy, but your time is your own.

“Practically, I devoted a minimum amount of time daily to Anam and particularly, I developed a method of writing by hand, then I’d type that up the next day and revise it on the computer. By the time I’d done that, I’d be back into the flow of it… on good days.”

Though Dao politely refuses to give any indication of a timeline (“the novel will be finished when it’s finished”), he gives some insight into what is preoccupying him.

“I’m working on another novel, slowly. My aspiration is to continue leading this double life. I’m transitioning from a PhD to a full time academic, so we’ll see how realistic that aspiration is. I learned so much from the process of writing Anam, and more so, working on this new novel. Whether it’s legal research or a novel, I’m always thinking about how are we supposed to live together? The things I discover in either of my pursuits feed into each other.

“The importance of recognition of writers and critics, the difference between winning and shortlisting, is that this prize really helps to give books longevity and that’s what I’m really interested in. The publishing industry and the media cycle move so quickly. The one thing that winning does is provide the ability for a book to endure. It’s a book based on my family history, so I’ve thought about it a lot and that’s fundamental: how to make it endure beyond the rapid cycle of media.”

Read a full wrap of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, including an interview with non-fiction finalist and law academic Alecia Simmonds in the upcoming Law Society Journal.