Yasuko Thanh
Yasuko Thanh (born June 30, 1971) is a Canadian novelist, short‑story writer, and guitarist from Victoria, British Columbia. She has lived in Canada, Mexico, Germany and Latin America. Thanh holds a BA and an MFA from the University of Victoria and has performed with the bands Jukebox Jezebel and 12 Gauge Facial. She left school at 15 and spent time living on the streets, later busking in Vancouver.
Thanh’s writing has won several awards. She won the 2009 Journey Prize for her short story “Floating Like the Dead,” which appears in her collection Floating Like the Dead (2012). The collection was named among Quill & Quire’s best books of 2012, and its story “Spring-blade Knife” won the 2013 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Short Story. The book was also nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award. Thanh has been a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Jim Deva Prize, and she won the Victoria Butler Book Prize.
Her first novel, Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains, appeared in 2016 and won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her memoir Mistakes to Run With was published in 2019 by Penguin Canada and became a national bestseller. In 2023 Penguin Canada published her novel To the Bridge, which follows a mother trying to keep her family together after her teenage daughter’s suicide attempt. A third novel, The Falling Maria, based on a fictional World War I fighter pilot, is planned for 2027 with Penguin Random House.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 12:09 (CET).