Ocean Vuong: ‘I don’t believe a writer should just keep writing as long as they’re alive’

Ocean Vuong, 34, is an American poet and novelist born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. His 2016 debut poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, won the TS Eliot prize and Forward prize in 2017. His debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019 and is being adapted for the screen by A24. His second collection of poetry, Time Is a Mother, out this week in paperback, was written after the passing of his mother and explores loss, memory, addiction and love. We communicated by email for this interview.

I’ve always believed, both in fiction and poetry, in Wallace Stevens’s ideal of imaginative writing coming from a “supreme