507 - Why Vietnamese Folklore Is Secretly A Gory Horror Story? - Kim Tran
About this episode
Kenneth Nguyen interviews Kim Tran about the complexities of Vietnamese folklore and the challenges of independent publishing.
In this episode, Ken sits down with Kim Tran, the brilliant bilingual founder of Coral Books (Vietnam) and Major Books (UK). Operating from London, Kim is executing a highly strategic literary mission: while Coral Books translates deep world literature into Vietnamese, Major Books does the opposite—introducing the fierce, complex, and unpolished soul of Vietnamese literature to the English-speaking world. Kim traces her profound internal evolution, moving from a self-described phase of corporate "Western-worship" as a teenager in 2000s Hanoi to a sharp awakening at University College London (UCL), where she realized that her own internalized bias contributed to the complete invisibility of Southeast Asian voices in global academia. She and Kenneth address the brutal economic realities of independent publishing in 2026, the toxic illusion of "perfect" translation, and why she explicitly refused to water down the gory, visceral horror elements of the June 2026 US release of Treasury of Vietnamese Folktales. Inside this deep dive into literary theory and cultural preservation: The Colonial Trickle-Down: Kenneth opens up about how his father's elite French education forced an…
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