An Evening with Viet Thanh Nguyen

Award-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen continues to gain recognition for his bold, elegant, and fiercely honest writing. His remarkable debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 and made the finalist list for the 2016 PEN/Faulkner award. His collection of short stories titled The Refugees was released in 2017. Nguyen and his family came to the United States as refugees during the Vietnam War. As he grew up in America, he began to notice that most movies and books about the war focused on Americans while the Vietnamese were silenced and erased. He was inspired by this lack of representation to write about the war from a Vietnamese perspective. The New York Times says that his novel, “fills a void…giving voice to the previously voiceless while it compels the rest of us to look at the events of forty years ago in a new light.” His voice is refreshing and powerful as he urges readers to examine the legacy of that tumultuous time and its aftermath from a new perspective. He is currently the Chair of the English Department at the University of Southern California where he is also an associate professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity.

In October 2017, Viet Thanh Nguyen was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant.

Part of The Center’s BIG IDEA project This Land is Whose Land?

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s lecture is presented in partnership with The Community Library and has been generously supported by an anonymous gift and Marcia & Don Liebich.