POSTPONED Vivian Pham - The Cocount Children

Vivian Pham's incredible novel The Coconut Children is an urgent, moving and wise debut from a young and gifted storyteller. If this is the measure of the future of Australian writing, we're in very good hands indeed. 

Vivian will be in-conversation with Daniel Carrington. Come along & meet her.  

This is a FREE event. 

About the Book

Growing up can feel like a death sentence.

Life in a troubled neighbourhood demands too much too young. But Sonny wouldn’t really know. Watching the world from her bedroom window, she exists only in second-hand romance novels and falls for any fast-food employee who happens to spare  her a glance.   

Everything changes with the return of Vince, a boy who became a legend after he was hauled away in handcuffs at fourteen. 

Sonny and Vince used to be childhood friends. But with all that  happened in-between, childhood seems so long ago. It will take two years of juvie, an inebriated grandmother and a porn stash for them to meet again.  

The Coconut Children is an urgent, moving and wise debut from a young and gifted storyteller.

Praise

“To read Vivian Pham is to read the  future of Australian writing. What a brilliant, self-contained bolt of pure teenage genius. Be prepared to be awed over what Gen Z can deliver.” - Benjamin Law

“In lyric slivers as sharp as the ‘blade of water’ refugees cross in the novel’s preface, Pham maps the  shape and grain of fierce and fragile resilience against intergenerational trauma, secrets and desire. The momentum of this novel, its originality, energy and verve, are extraordinary. Vivian Pham is, without doubt, a major new talent.” - Felicity Plunkett

"You’d have to go back to Carson McCullers’s debut to find such an accomplished and original voice in a writer so young. I’ve seen Vivian Pham stun an audience of 2000 with her oratory and original thinking on colonialism and the burden of history, and now she stuns on the page in this deeply felt and intimate coming-of-age novel. She shows a new Australia here, tied to her place and time but touching on universal themes of longing — and the alternately profound and ludicrous angst of youth. Vivian Pham is one of the indispensable voices of her generation." - Dave Eggers.    

About the Author

Vivian Pham is a Vietnamese-Australian fiction writer, closet poet, amateur  screenwriter, university student and hopeful dropout if any of the aforementioned ventures take flight. Her father was a Vietnamese boat refugee, and she grew up loving stories because she knew there was one inside of him.  

In 2018 and 2019, Vivian attended the International Congress of Youth Voices and shared a stage with incongruously successful writers and activists like Dave Eggers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rep. John Lewis and Khaled Hosseini. It is her greatest hope to have an impact on political issues through her creative work.  

Vivian is a fervent reader, watcher and listener. Her literary influences include James Baldwin, Monty Python, Wu Tang Clan and early 90s Hong Kong cinema. She is currently completing a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Philosophy, but she will not be able to tell you the meaning of life until the relevant unit learning outcome is achieved in Semester 2. 

About Daniel Carrington

Daniel Carrington is an aphorist and a researcher; he therefore spends most of his time thinking of how to write in the most concise, verbose way possible. He lived in the Midlands of England before emigrating to Australia with his family as a teenager. 

He is currently a doctoral student at Western Sydney University, writing a thesis on creativity in high school English study. He is also the author of a collection of aphorisms entitled Pluck the Living Flower. An Englishman at heart, his other areas of interest include satire and self-aggrandisement.