MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient and Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen is considered one of the leading voices in the urgent conversation around the immigrant experience. His breakout debut novel The Sympathizer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and was turned into an HBO limited series. His most recent nonfiction book, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, explores what it means to be an outsider from a variety of perspectives. A prolific essayist and opinion writer, he has published in The New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian.

Marking the arrival of a major literary talent, The Sympathizer combines the suspense of a thriller with the prose of a literary master. Its protagonist is one of the singular voices of contemporary fiction, a “a man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain building a life in America after the fall of Saigon while secretly working as a communist double agent. Writing in the New Yorker, Joyce Carol Oates called it “one of the greatest of Vietnam War novels . . . echoing not only Vladimir Nabokov and Ralph Ellison but the Dostoyevsky of Notes from the Underground.”

“Gleaming and uproarious, a dark comedy of confession filled with charlatans, delusionists and shameless opportunists . . . The Sympathizer, like Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, examines American intentions, often mixed with hubris, benevolence and ineptitude, that lead the country into conflict.”

—Los Angeles Times

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, the novel won numerous other awards, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association. It led to a sequel, The Committed, “a powerhouse of a novel” (Book Reporter) which follows the earlier novel’s main character as he arrives in early 1980s Paris and is sucked into its criminal underworld.

Nguyen has also written a bestselling collection of short stories, The Refugees, and he has edited volumes including The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora. To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other was originally given as the prestigious Norton Lectures. Grappling with similar themes of identity, displacement and belonging, his memoir A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, was a finalist for the Baillie Gifford Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award.

“A kaleidoscopic memoir . . . Deeply personal and intensely political . . . If the author’s criticism is understandably scathing, there is also a mischievous sense of humor . . . Nguyen indisputably captures the workings of a quicksilver and penetrating mind.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Nguyen has been on late night television with Seth Meyers and on air with Terry Gross, along with regular appearances on Democracy Now and many other venues, including Vanity Fair, the BBC, CNN, C-Span, NPR, and Al Jazeera.

He studied at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned undergraduate degrees in English and Ethnic Studies and a doctorate in English, and taught for nearly three decades at the University of Southern California. A powerful advocate for immigrants and refugees and a passionate believer in the principles of community, solidarity, and service, he helped to build the nonprofit Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and serves on the Boards of the Pulitzer Prizes and the International Rescue Committee.

He is married to the professor, scholar, and poet Lan Duong, who, like him, was born in Vietnam and grew up in San Jose, California. They live in southern California with their children.

For more information on Viet Thanh Nguyen, please visit vietnguyen.info.