Doung Thu Huong was born in Vietnam in 1947. At the age of twenty, she led a Communist Youth Brigade sent to the front during the Vietnam War. A vocal advocate of human rights and democratic reform, Huong was expelled from the Communist Party in 1990 before she was arrested and imprisoned without trial. Though her novels are banned in Vietnam, where she contiues to live in internal exile, she remains one of the most popular and controversial writers for Vietnamese readers both at home and abroad.