About the Author

  Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen (pronounced Viet Tang Win) was born in Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam (now Buon Me Thuot) in 1971 and came to the United States as a refugee with his parents in 1975. They lived in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, which served as a camp for war refugees. They would relocate one more time, to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, before settling in San Jose, California in 1978. After graduating high school he briefly attended both the University of California at Riverside and Los Angeles before finishing his college career at the University of California at Berkeley, where he would go on to receive his Ph.D. He currently teaches at UCLA.

The Sympathizer is Nguyen’s first novel. It was published in 2015 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that year. He is also the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002), Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016), The Refugees (Grove Press, 2017), and The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, which he edited.

 

 


 

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William Echler ’19

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