Full name: Phú Trạm, pen name: Inrasara
[Inra: Cham transliteration of Sanskrit Indra, the god of Thunder; Sara: salt]
Inrasara was born on August 20th 1957, in the Cham town of Caklaing. His hometown is known as “Mỹ Nghiệp, Phước Dân” in Vietnamese, and is located in Ninh Phước District, to the south of Phan Rang, in Ninh Thuận Province, along the south-central Vietnamese coastline. In the late 1960s, he was a student at Po Klong High School in Ninh Thuận province, where he graduated from High School in 1969. He then went on to study at the University of Pedagogy in Ho Chi Minh City in 1977, although he left university a year later to wander in Cham villages. He began collecting Cham poems and folk tales. He read philosophy and composed poems in both Vietnamese and Cham language. After five years of independent work, he became employed as a Research for the Editorial Committee of Cham Textbooks-Ninh Thuận Province in 1982. After decades of work, his research skills became widely recognized. In 1992, Inrasara moved to the University of Social Sciences & Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City, where he was employed as a Researcher at the Center for Vietnamese & Southeast Asian Studies. After six years at the university, however, he found that he was best left to his own devices as an independent scholar. Since 1998, he has thrived as a free writer and free thinker. He has published extensive poems in Vietnamese and Cham, along with numerous translations of Cham poetry into Vietnamese. He is renowned for his literary criticism, along with his research on Cham language and culture.
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