AustLit

Frank Palmos was Australia's youngest foreign correspondent at twenty-one and spent most of his career in journalism in Asia. Through the Fairfax newspapers and magazines he was a Jakarta correspondent before reporting the Vietnam War for the Age newspaper. He was the only journalist to escape a Viet Cong ambush in Saigon in 1968. Palmos wrote the English version of The Sorrow of War (London : Secker and Warburg, 1993), a novel by Vietnamese writer Bao Ninh. Palmos's English version is based on the translation from the Vietnamese by Vo Bang Thanh and Phan Thanh Hao, with Katerina Pierce. In 2010 the Society of Authors (UK) listed Palmos' translation as one of the 50 outstanding translations from the last 50 years. Palmos also wrote The Vietnam Press : The Unrealised Ambition (1995). Based in Perth he commuted to Asia on writing and film assignments.