Vietnamese writer Nguyen Ngoc Thuan has won the Swedish Peter Pan Award 2008 for best children’s literature for his story Vua nham mat vua mo cua so (Open the window with closed eyes).
Thuan is set to attend the awards ceremony to be held at the Gothenburg International Book Fair in September in Sweden.
Last year, the book was translated and published in Sweden as Blunda och öppna ditt fönster.
The book had earned Thuan the first prize in a national literature for children contest called “For the nation’s future” organized by the Ho Chi Minh City Writers’ Association in 2002.
Initiated by the International Board on Books for Young People in Sweden and the Gothenburg International Book Fair in 2000, the annual Peter Pan Award is given to only one foreign children’s writer.
Writers from France, the US, Russia, Ireland, Finland, Canada, China and now Vietnam have received the honorable award over the last eight years.
