The AustLit community is saddened to learn of the sudden passing of Boitran Huynh-Beattie. Boitran has been a researcher and indexer with the Australian Multicultural Writers section of AustLit at the University of Wollongong for the past three years. She died as a result of a stroke on Monday 16 January 2012, in Singapore. 

Boitran’s contribution to AustLit, through her documentation of Australian works in Vietnamese, has been invaluable. Her knowledge of Vietnamese-Australian writers and writing networks has meant that more than 2000 literary works have been recorded on AustLit, in both Vietnamese and English, providing an enormously significant body of data relating to Australian multicultural and multilingual literature. She was committed to making Vietnamese-Australian cultural production better known to the Australian public, both in literature and in visual arts – the field of her doctoral research.

Boitran came to Australia from Vietnam in 1995. She enrolled in a PhD in Art History at the University of Sydney and was awarded her doctorate in 2005. In 2009 she curated the Nam Bang! exhibition held at Casula Powerhouse Museum, an event which examined the consequences of the Vietnam War and brought together works by artists from Australia, Vietnam, the United States and France. Beginning in 2009, Boitran indexed Vietnamese-Australian literature for AustLit. She created records for the entire contents of the literary journals Tập Hợp and Việt, numerous anthologies, selected works of short stories and poetry, novels and autobiographies. Hardly any of this literary material was previously known outside the Vietnamese-Australian and Vietnamese diasporic community. Thanks to Boitran, its documentation is now available to researchers worldwide.

In 2011, Boitran took up an AsiaLink residency in Vietnam where she attended numerous exhibitions and book readings, and gave a number of public lectures on contemporary Australian art. She was also in contact with publishers, in search of literature published in Vietnam by Vietnamese-Australian writers. In November 2011, Boitran was invited by the Singapore Art Musuem to attend their Signature Art Prize award ceremony, for which Boitran had nominated five Vietnamese artists, one of whom was among the finalists. Boitran was back in Singapore in January 2012 on matters relating to visual art when she suffered an aneurysm and passed away. She will be greatly missed.

A condolence note in Vietnamese appears on the Tien Ve website.