Thanhhà Lai author page

Thanhhà Lai biography

Thanhhà Lai is a Vietnamese-American author of children’s and young adult books. Before publishing fiction, she worked as a journalist and later earned an MFA from New York University. Her first novel, Inside Out & Back Again, was published by HarperCollins in 2011 and draws partly on her own childhood experiences of leaving Việt Nam and beginning a new life in the United States.

Inside Out & Back Again is a novel in verse about ten-year-old Hà, who leaves Saigon with her family during the Việt Nam War and settles in Alabama. The book won the 2011 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and was named a 2012 Newbery Honor Book by the American Library Association.

Lai followed it with the middle-grade novel Listen, Slowly, published by HarperCollins in 2015. It follows Mai, a California girl who travels to Việt Nam with her grandmother and encounters family history and a culture with which she initially feels little connection. Lai’s first young adult novel, Butterfly Yellow, was published by HarperCollins in 2019. Set partly in Texas after the Việt Nam War, it follows refugee Hằng as she searches for the younger brother from whom she was separated. Butterfly Yellow received the 2021 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction.

Her first picture book, Hundred Years of Happiness, illustrated by Phung Nguyen Quang and Huynh Kim Lien, was published by Harper in 2022. In 2023, HarperCollins published When Clouds Touch Us, a novel in verse that continues Hà’s story two years after the events of Inside Out & Back Again. When Clouds Touch Us was named a 2023 Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book.