Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American professor, novelist, and writer. He was born on March 13, 1971, in Ban Mê Thuột, Vietnam, to refugee parents who moved to the United States after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Nguyen is currently the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He gained widespread recognition for his debut novel, The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and several other prestigious awards. Nguyen is also a regular contributor and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, focusing on topics such as immigration, refugees, politics, culture, and Southeast Asia. He has been honored with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. Nguyen is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.