Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American author and academic. Born in Vietnam in 1971, he came to the United States as a refugee at age four. He is a Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His debut novel The Sympathizer (2015) is a blackly comic espionage novel narrated by a communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Edgar Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction (2016), and the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature. Nguyen is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees (2017), the sequel novel The Committed (2021), the children's book Chicken of the Sea (2017, with Ellison Nguyen), and the essay collection A Man of Two Faces (2023). His work engages directly with the Vietnam War, refugee experience, colonialism, and identity, and has been praised as a major contribution to both American literature and Asian American studies. Nguyen is a frequent public intellectual and is widely regarded as one of the most important American writers of his generation. He lives in Los Angeles.