Viet Thanh Nguyen

Biography

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam, in 1971 and fled to the United States with his family in 1975 following the fall of Saigon — when he was four years old. He was separated from his parents during the refugee processing period. Raised in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he became a professor of English and American Studies at USC. The Sympathizer was his debut novel. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016, making Nguyen the first Vietnamese-American author to win the prize. He has said the novel is driven by his need to imagine what it would have felt like to have been old enough to understand what was happening in 1975.

Viet Thanh Nguyen at a glance