Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American professor and novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He lives in Pasadena with his wife, Lan Duong, and their two children.

Nguyen's debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and many other accolades. In addition, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. Nguyen is a regular contributor and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, covering immigration, refugees, politics, culture, and South East Asia. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Nguyen was born in Ban Mê Thuột, Vietnam, in 1971, the son of refugees from North Vietnam who moved south in 1954. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, his family fled to the United States. Nguyen's family first settled in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, which was one of four American camps that accommodated refugees from Vietnam. Nguyen's family then moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1978.

His family later moved to San Jose, California, where they opened up a Vietnamese grocery store, one of the first of its kind in the area. He often enjoyed reading literature about the Vietnam War, preferably from the Vietnamese perspectives, which were rather rare at the time compared to the overwhelming amount of American narratives. While growing up in San Jose, Nguyen attended St. Patrick School, a Catholic elementary school, and went on to Bellarmine College Preparatory.

Nguyen then briefly attended the University of California campuses at Riverside and Los Angeles before finally deciding to finish his studies at Berkeley, from where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in May 1992 with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in English and Ethnic Studies. He received his Ph.D. in English from Berkeley in May 1997.

That year, he moved to Los Angeles for a teaching position as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California in the English Department and the American Studies and Ethnicity Department. In 2003, he became an associate professor in the two departments. In addition to teaching and writing, Nguyen serves as cultural critic-at-large for The Los Angeles Times and is an editor of diaCRITICS, a blog for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network.

Nguyen also uses the platform he has gained from his writing accolades to step up on social platforms, using his traditional success markers to be a leading voice of the Vietnamese American community. He gives non-Vietnamese US-Americans context for the story of Vietnamese in the United States today, as well as being a leader for Asian US-American youth as he talks about what the term "Asian-American" means to him.