The Quê Mẹ Team
Ỷ Lan Penelope Faulkner
Penelope Faulkner, also known by her Vietnamese pen name Ỷ Lan, is the founder and leader of the “Quê Mẹ Online” project.
Penelope was Design Editor of Quê Mẹ from its creation in 1976, then Deputy Editor (1979-2000). She also wrote regularly for Quê Mẹ. A selection of her short stories was broadcast on the BBC and published in a best-selling book, Quê Nhà, which was reprinted nine times.
Born in York, UK, she studied Vietnamese at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO) in Paris, specialising in literature and current affairs. She is a writer and radio journalist, broadcasting in English and Vietnamese. She has also served as media consultant for BBC programmes such as the film “Artists in Exile” in the series “Spirit of Asia”, produced by Sir David Attenborough and Michael MacIntyre, and BBC television series “Human Rights and Human Wrongs”.
Penelope is also President of the Vietnam Committee on Human Rights (VCHR), author of numerous reports on religious freedom, legal reforms, minority rights, the death penalty, women’s rights and Internet freedom in Vietnam. She testifies at the United Nations, European Parliament and other international forums.
Võ Trần Nhật
Born in Paris, Võ Trần Nhật grew up and became involved in Quê Mẹ’s activities from a very young age, helping with the magazine and taking part in its numerous cultural and human rights campaigns. A graduate of the Faculty of Law at Saint-Maur (University of Paris XII), he joined the Vietnam Committee on Human Rights (VCHR) in 1996.
As VCHR’s Executive Secretary, Võ Trần Nhật has written numerous articles and reports on the human rights situation in Vietnam, the Vietnamese legal system and criminal law, prison conditions, freedom of religion or belief (FoRB), the Vietnamese electoral system and the death penalty. He co-authored the chapter on Vietnam in the 1997 and 1998 reports of the International Prison Observatory (OIP). He has addressed international and national forums such as the UN Human Rights Council, the Taiwan International Religious Freedom Forum (TIRFF) and the Danish Parliament to report on human rights violations in Vietnam.
Võ Trần Nhật also holds a degree in Vietnamese Studies from Paris Cité University (formerly Paris Diderot University / Paris VII). He is currently Vice-President of the VCHR.
Vũ Hoàng Thư
Vũ Hoàng Thư is a Vietnamese poet and writer. He was born in 1949 in Huế and grew up in Nha Trang. He left Vietnam with his family in 1975 and settled in the United States, where he now resides in Midway City, California.
Before 1975, he served as an officer in the Republic of Vietnam Navy. After immigrating to the United States, he studied Electrical Engineering at California State University, Long Beach and went on to work for organizations including Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Lockheed Martin, and Xerox.
Since 1999, he has been the founder and editor-in-chief of the online literary journal Văn Nghệ Biển Khơi, a forum dedicated to Vietnamese literature and culture.
His published works are:
- Bắt Nắng (Catching Sunlight), essays and reflections, Quê Mẹ Publishing House, Paris, 2009
- Một Thoáng (A Fleeting Moment), poetry collection, Quê Mẹ Publishing House, Paris, 2019.
Võ Trần Uyên Minh
Uyên Minh is a computer engineer with over 30 years experience, and a consultant in Customer Relationship Management. He has worked for both large and small companies in several countries, including France, Sweden and the USA. He notably participated in setting up the IT systems for the National Library of France (BnF).
He became interested in human rights issues at a very early age, and voluntarily contributed his IT and other skills, particularly as a photographer and videographer, to Quê Mẹ’s human rights campaigns. He has digitised or edited several Quê Mẹ videos, including an exclusive documentary on the demonstration of 40,000 Buddhists for religious freedom in Hue in 1993.
Uyên Minh contributed to the “Quê Mẹ Online” project by supervising Tycho Lecavelier’s internship, guiding and advising him on the design of software programmes to develop the project’s database.
Tycho Lecavelier
Tycho Lecavelier is a student of engineering at Telecom SudParis, a prestigious graduate school specialising in the field of digital sciences and technology. He specialises in computer science. During a one-month internship at VCHR in the summer of 2025, Tycho contributed to the archiving and digitisation of Quê Mẹ journals. As part of this project, he designed an optical character recognition (OCR) programme that converts images of magazine pages into searchable and usable digital text.