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Welcome to the website of
ELIZABETH MCLEAN
Writer. Reader. Visual artist.
I am the author of The Swallows Uncaged, A Narrative in Eight Panels, a collection of eight fictional narratives dramatizing the lives of Vietnamese women and their families from the 11th century to the present. I worked on it in Hanoi, glued to my bamboo stool three hours a day, six days a week.
The original title of the book was Imagining Vietnam. It won the 2011 Impress Prize for New Writers in the UK, and was published there in 2012. The Canadian publisher, Freehand Books of Calgary, Alberta, changed the title and published the volume in 2015.
Woman King and the Naked Warriors is the working title of my new novel. The narrative follows the life of Trac Trung, a daring Vietnamese woman, who twenty centuries ago expelled the Chinese from the valley of the Red River (now in northern Vietnam). When the enemy reinvaded, she conscripted her sister Nhi and an army of men and women, and led it, atop her elephant, against their army of men, to a savage confrontation on the battlefield. She won the battle but then the humiliated Chinese retaliated... with a vengeance.
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