Authors received awards at the closing ceremony and award ceremony of the "Huong River Short Story Contest 2024". Photo: N. Minh

The contest encourages new discoveries and explorations in composition; promotes creativity to create good works about Vietnamese people and the people and cultural land of Thuan Hoa - Phu Xuan - Hue city; at the same time, creates conditions to attract and discover talents in the field of literature and art.

Touching stories about war. There, soldiers sacrificed their love, family, and devoted themselves to their homeland; the war ended, the love affairs during the war were now broken, shattered, or for a reason that was not their own, they were scattered in many directions. Authors writing about war also accounted for a significant proportion; there were authors who were soldiers returning to write, they had touching reminiscences, both themselves and the image of their comrades, of a compartment still kept in their memories; they looked at war with their own experiences, after having "gone through the war" of hardship.

Many short stories have expressed the theme of revolutionary war, showing that love and family are still common points among many soldiers, the great losses when they have devoted their youth to the Fatherland, making readers appreciate more the value of peace today.

The section on nature, people and heritage of Hue is oriented towards preserving the ancient Hue space with love stories associated with the royal court, beautiful, sad, but pure... All are gathered in the love, the feelings between people who are devoted to Hue, the core is to preserve the common values ​​which are also the etiquette in the soul. The theme of love in the palace, in the Citadel, the royal family with the poor and humble men and women of common people is exploited. An old space but also a new feature in the theme of Hue, is exploited quite carefully, associated with rivers, temples, old and gentle speech. The love here is not easy to see, the pain is not shown on the face, but swirls somewhere in the depths of emotions. Along with that are ancient melodies, poems that speak for the love story, the missed beats, the off-beat beats. There, there are families of generations intertwining thoughts, thinking, sometimes conflicting, even broken...

Young authors have sought to explain the confusion in the mind between reality and dream or between the virtual world and reality that are so intertwined that it is difficult to distinguish. The plots are like the world they have created, painted with the colors of happiness and destruction, of splashing and splashing. Readers will get lost in the sky where they still feel like they have been there, visited somewhere, sometimes like in a previous life. That, after all, is still the dream of cleaning up the entanglements in the mind to find peace, although that cleaning up is sometimes like a catalyst for life, like pain, tears and alcohol, the catalyst of strange winds.

Many young writers want to be more comfortable in choosing topics. Sometimes their topics are directionless, like sleepwalking and the blurring of reason. Of course, there is one thing in common: the youthful imprint, though dreamy, still shows the aftershocks in real life that have caused them to fall into frustrating situations, forcing them to relieve themselves with dreamy horizons. They have a vague space, always longing to find a pure harmony in the midst of life full of hidden uncertainties.

Regardless of the theme of the works, “Short Stories on the Perfume River 2024” also aims at humanity, the sorrow of life, separation and loss due to circumstances, war and hasty mistakes. Life has gatherings and separations, pushing and shoving beyond one’s control, the swirl of adversity; there are happinesses that spread far and wide, felt by readers as a transformation of creativity, of love; these are things that the art of language reveals. Hue also appears in splendid, pure, and refined pages of literature. Literary semantics have illuminated hidden corners, heritage sites that shine brightly in Hue’s cultural space.

Nguyen Huong