Author · Vietnam
Tố Hữu
Died in 2002
Tố Hữu (1920-2002), whose real name was Nguyễn Kim Thành, was born near Huế, into a family of poor scholars, and joined the Indochinese Communist Party at the age of eighteen. Arrested in 1939, he spent three years in prison, escaped in 1942 and went underground. After 1945 he became the party's head of ideology, sat on the politburo and was deputy prime minister in charge of the economy, a post he left after the failure of the 1985 monetary reform. He died in Hanoi in 2002.