Tran Minh Hop

Introduction

Tran Minh Hop studied Security Studies for a Bachelor's degree and Cultural Management for a Master's degree. He used to work as a university lecturer. Currently, he is studying in the Ph.D. Program in Asia-Pacific Regional Studies at National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan. He started to write when he was a high school student with a few pieces of prose for teenage Newspapers. Until now, he wrote more than two hundred fiction and nonfiction articles such as short stories and realistic prose, and two hundred episodes for a reality television show about impoverished people, all of which were published for circulation within well-known Vietnamese official communication agencies. Then those articles were collected and commercially published into ten books. Literature Rewards: Runner-up in the teenage newspaper's literary contest for Vietnamese writers under 18 years of age (2006). Winner of the Ho Chi Minh City Young Writer Award (2011)

Resident planning

The novel "Silver Croakers" (written in Vietnamese) tells the stories of Xeo Chuan, and his tribe Zu. The Zu people had to move out of their ancestral lands for the Xoi Tang company to build a naphtha plant. The Zu tribe's teenagers have brilliantly sensitive long tongues, they can taste to know whether the seawater is pure. Xeo Chuan and his friends had to go to the factory to work as tasters to earn their family's living. The company uses many ways to ‘tongue-wash' them to make them unable to distinguish between pure seawater and impure seawater. One day, a mass of dead silver croakers densely covered the sea surface. Xeo Chuan discovered that the naphtha factory discharged impurities into seawater which caused the death of silver croakers. This aroused him to fight against the factory to regain the ancestral land for his tribe.