Two foreign scholars are to receive Phan Chu Trinh Awards for their contribution to promoting Vietnamese culture.
They are ethnologist Ivo Vasiljev from the Czech Republic and US writer Kevin Bowen.
The awards were announced on March 15 by the science council of the Phan Chu Trinh Cultural Fund.
Vasiljev translated President Ho Chi Minh's Nhat Ky Trong Tu (Diary in Prison) into the Czech language. He has also researched Vietnamese ancient heritage and old scripts.
Bowen has promoted Vietnamese literature in the US . Over the past decades, Bowen and the William Joiner Centre in Boston , where he works as a director, have invited Vietnamese writers, poets and researchers to the US .
They have also received many delegations of Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange and called on Americans to support the victims.
The Phan Chu Trinh Awards are made annually. This year it also will be granted to Professor Hoang Tuy for his research on education renovation, literature critic Lai Nguyen An for his research on Vietnamese literature and language, and translators Nguyen Don Phuoc and Pham Van Thieu in the field of economics and physics.
The fund was set up in 2007 by a group of scholars and comes under the Vietnam Union of Science and Technology Associations. It aims to encourage and honour cultural research, support translated works for the World Knowledge Quintessence Bookshelf project, and sponsor scholarships for cultural research and translation training.
Phan Chu Trinh was a Vietnamese intellectual and revolutionist in the late 19th century. The awards will be presented at a ceremony in HCM City on March 24./.
