The fiction chosen for this collection have been in active circulation in Vietnam since 1986, ‘The Reform Year’, when Vietnamese artists and writers were politically and culturally ‘liberated’ and engaged with great commitment in criticizing, among other things, the government’s environmental policies and ways in which these were enmeshed in economic strategies and schemes for so-called national progress. Thus, modernization and industrialization that were the chosen paths of the postcolonial Vietnamese government, become the major targets of contemporary Vietnamese ecofiction. All these stories, extremely contemporary, emphasise a counter-narrative that challenges socialist goals of development and modernisation. They articulate and affirm a more holistic vision, where man is no longer a predator but a participant of nature. These stories therefore are politically charged and pave the path for a more visionary future.

<p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Tran Duy Phien (1942-)</strong>&nbsp;is an author of a numerous novels and short stories that were published under the collapsed Republic of Vietnam (1954-1975) and the present-day Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Some of them are&nbsp;<em>Đốt lửa sau m&acirc;y</em>&nbsp;(long story, 1969)&nbsp;<em>Trước khi mặt trời mọc</em>&nbsp;(collection of stories, 1972),&nbsp;<em>Trăm năm c&ograve;n lại</em>&nbsp;(novel, 1996),&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>Kiến v&agrave; Người</em>&nbsp;(collection of stories, 1996),&nbsp;<em>Ngược d&ograve;ng ph&ugrave; hoa</em>&nbsp;(collection of stories, 1997),&nbsp;<em>Chim trong th&agrave;nh qu&aacute;ch cũ</em>&nbsp;(collection of stories), 2003.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong><strong>Nguyen Minh Chau</strong></strong>&nbsp;<strong><strong>(1930-1989)</strong></strong>&nbsp;was a military author who identified himself to write to serve the nation&rsquo;s nationalist and socialist revolutions. He was the first author who criticized the socialist realism of Vietnam, calling for a reform of the national literature. Some of his works are:&nbsp;<em>Cửa song</em>&nbsp;(novel, 1966),&nbsp;<em>D&acirc;́u ch&acirc;n người lính</em>&nbsp;(novel, 1972),&nbsp;<em>Mi&ecirc;̀n cháy</em>&nbsp;(novel,1977),&nbsp;<em>Người đàn bà tr&ecirc;n chuy&ecirc;́n tàu t&ocirc;́c hành</em>&nbsp;(short story, 1983),&nbsp;<em>Bến qu&ecirc;</em>&nbsp;(short story, 1985).</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong><strong>Trần Trung Ch&iacute;nh (1953-)&nbsp;</strong></strong>is the&nbsp;author of many short stories, most of which were published in&nbsp;<em>Lao Dong</em>&nbsp;newspaper and&nbsp;<em>Song Huong</em>&nbsp;magazine (1989-1992). The short story&nbsp;<em>Black Carp</em>, included in his anthology&nbsp;<em>Cư tr&uacute;</em>&nbsp;(2006), is often quoted by Vietnamese scholars as a typical ecofiction of Vietnam.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong><strong>Ho&agrave;ng Tố Mai (1972-)</strong></strong>&nbsp;is an author and an ecocritic of Vietnam. Some of her works are&nbsp;<em>Nắng nhạt ơi nắng nhạt</em>&nbsp;(collection of short stories, 2002),&nbsp;<em>Thực đơn m&acirc;y trắng</em>&nbsp;(collection of short stories, 2017), and&nbsp;<em>Ph&ecirc; b&igrave;nh sinh th&aacute;i l&agrave; g&igrave;&nbsp;</em>(collection of key texts in ecocriticism that were translated into Vietnamese in 2017).</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong><strong>Y Ban (1961-)</strong></strong>&nbsp;is the author of five collections of short stories, the first of which,&nbsp;<em>Người đ&agrave;n b&agrave; c&oacute; ma lực: truyện ngắ</em>n (collection of stories), won second prize in a national writing competition in 1993. She has also had seventy stories published in anthologies. Two of her books, I&nbsp;<em>am Woman&nbsp;</em>(2006) and&nbsp;<em>N&agrave;y hỏi thật đ&atilde; thấy g&igrave; chưa đấy?</em>&nbsp;(2011), were banned after publication in Vietnam.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong><strong>Nguyễn Ngọc Tư (1976-)</strong></strong>&nbsp;is a short story writer and novelist from the southern province C&agrave; Mau in the Mekong Delta. She has received various awards, including the Southeast Asian Writers Award in 2008 and the Vietnam Writers' Association Award for her most famous work&nbsp;<em>C&aacute;nh đồng bất tận</em>&nbsp;(2006).&nbsp;<em>C&aacute;nh đồng bất tận</em>&nbsp;has been translated into Korean, Swedish, English, and German. The first collection of her stories in English, entitled&nbsp;<em>Floating Lives</em>, was published in 2012.</p>