Ocean Vuong on The Emperor of Gladness

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet and novelist whose work in both fields is highly acclaimed.

His 2016 debut poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, earned Vuong the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, while his debut novel, 2019’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous won the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, and The New England Book Award.

In 2025 Vuong published his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, a story about chosen family, unexpected friendship and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive, which takes place in 2009 in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut. And in September of 2025 he joined us here at the Southbank Centre to discuss the book on stage with Mendez; a talk which we’re delighted to share with you here.

The event begins with Vuong reading from the novel, before going on to discuss, among many other things, history being a fiction through its omissions; making literature from the American dream of restoring the promise of youth; the haunting presence of war and the importance of underpinning work with theory.

Vuong also answers questions from the auditorium audience on drawing on spirituality in his work, and his belief that literature can’t exist of itself alone; on being aware of the need to balance a freedom to write anything with a restraint that allows you to keep writing, and how poetry offered him a ‘great laboratory’ for ideas and concepts that ultimately inform his novels.

This talk was recorded in our Queen Elizabeth Hall in September 2025.