Writer Ocean Vuong 's fans include Dua Lipa and Björk , and lines from his poetry are quoted on T-shirts from Peter Do's first collection for Helmut Lang. The debut novel of the superstar of contemporary American literature , “On This Earth, We Are Beautiful for a Moment,” was published by ARTBOOKS — we tell you why Ocean Vuong's name is worth remembering.
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In 2019, the famous Vietnamese-American author Ocean Vuong debuted with the novel of upbringing “On this Earth, We Are Beautiful for a Moment” – and immediately became a star in the United States. The work immediately hit the bestseller list of The New York Times and won several prestigious literary awards, Ocean starred for Vogue and GQ, and his books were interviewed by Dua Lipa and Björk. The MacArthur Foundation called him a genius, and in the first three years since the release of “On this Earth, We Are Beautiful for a Moment” the book sold more than a million copies in 40 languages.
Before his big debut in prose, Vuong had made a name for himself through poetry. His first collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), won prestigious literary awards, including the TS Eliot Prize, and drew critical attention to a new voice—intimate, politically sensitive, and at the same time, extraordinarily musical.
At the same time, Ocean's path to literature was atypical. He grew up in a poor family of illiterate refugees from Vietnam, began to learn English only later in school and read his first book at the age of 11. Poetry became the key to mastering a new language and at the same time provided an opportunity to better understand his own experiences: war, migration, poverty, trauma and growing up between cultures.
The transition to prose came when Vuong decided to tell the story of his family and the previous generation with the same scale and uncompromisingness that he saw in the great American novels. In particular, in Herman Melville's “Moby Dick”. He decided to reread this book when he moved to New England. Ocean was impressed not so much by the story about the whale as by the way of thinking: Melville allowed himself to write about everything – from the technical details of whaling to the philosophy of “whiteness”, without simplifying or making excuses to the reader. For Vuong, this work became an example of absolute authorial freedom. He asked himself a specific question: what would happen if a queer author, the son of immigrants, allowed himself the same uncompromisingness?
Thus was born the novel “On This Earth We Are Beautiful for a Moment” – an intimate and at the same time large-scale story of growing up, depicted in the form of a letter from a son to a mother who will never be able to read it (Ocean's mother died of breast cancer). The main character, nicknamed Tsutsik, writes to his illiterate mother, trying to overcome the distance with the help of words, to share with her what they could never say out loud. Through this intimate confession, he recreates the story of a family that begins in Vietnam and continues in America – a country that became for them both a chance for survival and a source of new traumas. At the center of the text is the complex, contradictory, but unconditional love between a single mother and her son. The novel honestly and without embellishment explores the experience of immigration, poverty, racial inequality, fragile masculinity, sexual identity and growing up in an environment marked by violence, addictions and social vulnerability.
The book is based on the author's own experiences. Ocean's grandfather was an American soldier in Vietnam, his grandmother was a poor city dweller. After the fall of Saigon, the family fell apart, and then the family members were in orphanages and refugee camps. Vuong himself ended up in the United States as a baby after spending several months in a Philippine refugee camp. The writer's mother worked in a nail salon and did not speak English, so the family lived in poverty. The writer grew up in a home where books were not read, but stories were often told.
Ocean's grandfather was an American soldier in Vietnam, his grandmother was a poor city woman
Like the book's protagonist, Tsucyk, Vuong worked on a tobacco farm in Connecticut as a teenager. There, he learned the value of physical labor and learned a lot from his then-colleagues from Appalachian and Latino families. The theme of poverty, the experience of seasonal work, and growing up in provincial America in the early 2000s — with its pop culture, guns, and opioid crisis — directly formed the basis of the book.
At some point, Tsucyk enters into a relationship with Trevor, the grandson of a tobacco warehouse owner, who lives in a trailer with his alcoholic father and survives on fast food and Sprite. For Tsucyk, this connection becomes a moment of self-discovery: for the first time, he feels his own body as desirable and worthy of love, finding a language for intimacy that was lacking in his family and social environment. Trevor grew up in poverty, domestic violence, and addiction, and their intimacy exists as a brief, fragile experience of youth that cannot withstand the pressures of adulthood. Through this story, Vuong speaks not only about first love, but also about his own formation – about shame and acceptance, corporeality and tenderness, about the awareness of his own homosexuality in an environment where masculinity was often identified with aggression, silence, and emotional closure.
“On this Earth, we are beautiful for only a moment” is an intimate and at the same time large-scale story of growing up, depicted in the form of a letter from a son to his mother.
In 2025, Vuong's second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, also caught the world's attention, and Oprah Winfrey included it in her book club. “Ocean Vuong's ability to take characters from everyday lives and give their existence extraordinary meaning makes each of us look at our own lives in a new way. He is a brilliant writer, poet, and a true master of the word,” Oprah noted.
On Instagram, the writer is no less open than in writing: he shares tips on the craft and publishes candid photos. He has also been noticed by representatives of the fashion industry: designer Peter Do used a quote from Vuong's poems in his first collection as creative director of the Helmut Lang brand – “they lied to you no one here was ever ugly.”
In addition to writing, Vuong teaches creative writing at New York University. Students, he says, often come to him with a request for a new ethical and political sensitivity. Many young writers are eager to learn how to write differently — more attentive to global context, to issues of power and representation. At the same time, the traditional literary canon provides them with almost no examples of such sensitivity, so the new generation has to find its own way, the author notes.
Ocean Vuong has often said that his worldview was shaped by Buddhism. This practice taught him not to take his own persona too seriously and not to trust the hype surrounding success. He admits that his personal goal in writing is to bring creativity to inner completion, to find a form in which he can put a period and learn to let go of the text.