Nguyen Chi Thien - Telegraph After being released in 1977, Thien lived with a friend and wrote down almost 400 poems from memory. He chose Bastille Day 1979 to smuggle his work to the French Embassy in Hanoi, but was deterred by Vietnamese security guards outside. Two days later, pursued by another security detail, he plunged into the British Embassy, shouting in English: "I am not a madman, I am a poet and I have something important to give to you." As three British diplomats managed to hold back the guards, he handed over a manuscript with a covering letter which read: "Most of [the poems] were written during my years of detention. I think it is incumbent upon us, the victims, more so than upon anyone else, to show to the world the incredible suffering of our mercilessly oppressed and tortured people. Of my broken life there remains but one dream, that is to see the greatest possible number of people realise that communism is a great calamity for mankind. By 1980 poems from his first collection began to circulate among the Vietnamese diaspora and in 1982 an English translation was published as Flowers From Hell (an allusion to Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal). The work was then translated into eight other languages and in 1986 Thien won the Rotterdam International Poetry Prize. His plight prompted increasingly vociferous demands for his release from organisations like Amnesty and Pen (the international writers" group) and from a few political leaders, including Britain's Prime Minister John Major. In 1991 he was released from prison, but kept under house arrest until 1995 when, weak in body (he had developed tuberculosis in prison), but indomitable in spirit, he was allowed to emigrate to the United States. Poetry was what kept me alive and thinking. It kept me sane," Thien explained. What also kept me going was that I believed that right would always win out in the end in a fight against evil. The youngest of five children, Nguyen Chi Thien was born in Hanoi, in what was then French Indochina, on February 27 1939. His father was a court clerk. When communist North Vietnam was established in 1954 under the Geneva Accords, he welcomed the new dispensation. But like many North Vietnamese, he turned against the regime during the ensuing reign of terror when the dictatorship embarked on a disastrous Soviet-inspired land reform programme, during which many thousands of people were denounced as "class enemies" and shot. As a young man Thien wrote love poems, happily lending them to friends so that they could impress their girlfriends. When in 1958 the Hanoi regime inaugurated a Chinese-style "100 flowers" campaign of liberalisation, Thien, encouraged by the implied promise of freedom of expression, asked permission to publish a literary journal to be called For the People. The next day the police came calling. Thien's poetry made hard reading for Western apologists for communism . After Bertrand Russell praised the Hanoi regime in evidence at the Stockholm "tribunal" that judged America guilty of war crimes, Thien composed a Letter to Bertrand Russell: "The world respects you as a philosopher/But in politics, you are only a novice./ After all your noisy defences of the Vietcong,/ Can you in truth say you really know them?/Please come and have a look at our country,/Come and see for yourself our system of slavery,/Come and visit our countless prisons/Where even pigs and cows fare better than people./Just come and seek one angry testimony:/ You will learn how we have been hushed forever./Only then will you understand them, your allies,/Whom you will want chopped into many pieces./My dear Sir, you're a hundred years of age/But in 'Communistology" you're a mere babe." After moving to America, Thien continued to campaign for the thousands of political dissidents still languishing in Vietnam's jails and was scathing of those who sought to build economic links with Vietnam. "If politicians in the Free World think that they can de-link business and human rights," he said in 1996, "they deserve, and can expect the contempt that people living under a totalitarian regime will reserve for them." Thien never married and had no children. Nguyen Chi Thien, born February 27 1939, died October 2 2012