Nam Le

This poem was commissioned in response to Sidney Nolan’s painting, Quilting the armour (1947).

Quilting the armour by Nam Le is an ekphrastic poem, commissioned in partnership with Red Room Poetry with the intention of amplifying connections between poetry and works in the national collection. An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description, written in response to a work of art.

Le’s debut poetry collection 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem was published in March 2024 in Australia, the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Poems from this collection were published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic, BOMB, Lana Turner, HEAT and elsewhere.

Le’s work has been translated into over fourteen languages and has received major awards in America, Europe and Australia, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature and the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship. Le’s work has appeared in modern classics series and is widely anthologized and taught.