Viet Thanh Nguyen
Biography
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.
Books
From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen and illustrator Minnie Phan comes an unforgettable story of a Vietnamese American girl whose life is transformed by a wildfire.
When Simone is awakened by her mom as a wildfire threatens their home, it is the beginning of a life-changing journey. On their way to take shelter in a high school gym, the family passes firefighters from a prison unit battling the fire. Simone’s mom tells her that when she was a girl in Viet Nam, she was forced to evacuate her home after a flood. Joined by other children sheltering in the gym, Simone, a budding artist, encourages everyone to draw as a way to process their situation. After a few days, Simone and her mom are able to return to their home, which is fortunately still standing, and her outlook has changed. As Simone begins creating a piece of art with one of her new friends, she realizes that even though they are young, they can dream and work together for a more sustainable future. With a poetic, haunting family story by esteemed author Viet Thanh Nguyen and gorgeous art from illustrator Minnie Phan, this powerful tale introduces an unforgettable young heroine who awakens to a new role fighting for her community and for the future of the planet.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen follows a half-French, half-Vietnamese man serving as a spy for the Communist forces in the final days of the Vietnam War. The novel is framed as a confession written by the narrator to a mysterious commandant, by whom he is being held prisoner. The narrator is forced to abandon Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in order to maintain his cover and to continue spying on the general whom he had been working under for the duration of the war. During his time in America, the narrator becomes a consultant on a Hollywood film about the war, continues spying on the General, and must make increasingly difficult decisions to maintain his cover and navigate his divided loyalties.
The legacy of the Vietnam War has haunted America’s cultural imagination for decades, and yet it’s only in recent years that actual Vietnamese voices have started gaining mainstream Anglophone literary attention. Set to be published upon the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, THE CLEAVING: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora (April 15, 2025; UC Press), edited by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, assembles 40 of these voices into a collection of dialogues. A monumental work on multiple levels, The Cleaving will be the first anthology of its kind to represent the Vietnamese diasporic experience and imagination from a truly global perspective.
Both delightfully readable and deeply insightful, The Cleaving organizes its conversations into five thematic chapters: “On Violence,” “Authorship and Authority,” “Writing Feminism and Disobedience,” “Representation, Writing, and Reception,” and “Form and Future,” that offer multiple entry points and paths through the work, a structure that lends itself to both accessibility and unexpected pleasures. Fans of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s sharp critical eye or the poignant beauty of Ocean Vuong’s poetry and prose will all find something to love in this collection. Yet they’ll also be stunned by the discovery of equally fascinating but lesser-known voices, such as the French-educated fashion designer and writer Anna Moï or acclaimed Manila-born artist and graphic novelist Marcelino Truong.
Ultimately, The Cleaving charts an entirely new path for its form. It is both an embodied work of living history and a bold vision of the future that dares to imagine—as its editors write—that so-called minority writers can reject competing against one another for crumbs in an extractive art and writing industry, and instead flourish together in radical solidarity. Its contributions will be invaluable to scholars, writers, and general readers of Asian diasporic literature across the world for years to come.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer (now an HBO series) comes a moving and unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness and a bold call for expansive political solidarity.
Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans.
The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing? Over the course of six captivating and moving chapters, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are, by turns, literary, historical, political, and familial.
Each piece moves between writers who influenced Nguyen’s craft and weaves in the haunting story of his late mother’s mental illness. Nguyen unfolds the novels and nonfiction of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston, until aesthetic theories give way to pressing concerns raised by war and politics. What is a writer’s responsibility in a time of violence? Should we celebrate fiction that gives voice to the voiceless–or do we confront the forces that render millions voiceless in the first place? What are the burdens and pleasures of the “minor” writer in any society? Unsatisfied with the modest inclusion accorded to “model minorities” such as Asian Americans, Nguyen sets the agenda for a more radical and disquieting solidarity with those whose lives have been devastated by imperialism and forever wars.