Viet Thanh Nguyen

Biography

Nguyen was born in Buon Me Thuot, Vietnam in 1971, the son of immigrants 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 until 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. While growing up in San Jose, Nguyen attended St. Patrick's School and Bellarmine College Preparatory from which he graduated.

Nguyen briefly attended the University of California Riverside and UCLA before finally deciding to finish his studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where in May 1992 he graduated from and obtained a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in English and Ethnic Studies. He went on to receive 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 both the English Department, and in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department. In 2003, he became an associate professor in the two departments.

In addition to teaching and writing, Nguyen also 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.

Novels

Nguyen's debut novel, The Sympathizer was published in 2015 by the Grove Press/Atlantic. The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Sympathizer further won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Fiction from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association. The book additionally won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from an American Author from the Mystery Writers of America, and was a finalist in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. The novel has also won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The Sympathizer has also made it to more than 30 "Book-of-the-Year" lists, including ones from The New York Times (including being a NYT Editor's Choice), The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Slate.com, Amazon.com and The Washington Post.

Short stories

Nguyen's short fiction has been published in Best New American Voices 2007 ("A Correct Life: Một Cuộc Sống Đứng Đắn"), Manoa, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross-Cultural Collision and Connection, Narrative Magazine ("Someone Else Besides You", "Arthur Arellano" and "Fatherland", which was a prize winner in the 2011 Winter Fiction Contest), TriQuarterly ("The War Years" - Issue 135/136), The Good Men Project ("Look At Me") the Chicago Tribune ("The Americans", also a 2010 Nelson Algren Short Story Awards finalist), and Gulf Coast, where his story won the 2007 Fiction Prize.

Nguyen released a book of short stories, published by Grove Press in February 2017 entitled The Refugees.

Non-fiction

Nguyen has also released a non-fiction book published by the Harvard University Press in March 2016 entitled Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War described on his website as "the critical bookend to a creative project whose fictional bookend was The Sympathizer". According to Nguyen's website, the book Nothing Ever Dies "examines how the so-called Vietnam War has been remembered by many countries and people, from the US to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and South Korea." Kirkus Reviews has also called the book "a powerful reflection on how we choose to remember and forget." The book is a National Book Award finalist.

In 2002, Nguyen published a treatise entitled Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press). Nguyen has also co-edited a treatise entitled Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (University of Hawaii Press, 2014) along with Janet Hoskins.

Nguyen's non-fiction articles and essays have also appeared in numerous journals and books, including PMLA, American Literary History, Western American Literature, positions: east asia cultures critique, The New Centennial Review, Postmodern Culture, The Japanese Journal of American Studies, and Asian American Studies After Critical Mass.

Accolades

Nguyen has also been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2011-2012), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2008-2009) and the Fine Arts Work Center (2004-2005). He has also received residencies, fellowships, and grants from the Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the James Irvine Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Djerassi Artists Residency, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation.

His teaching and service awards include the Mellon Mentoring Award for Faculty Mentoring Graduate Students, the Albert S. Raubenheimer Distinguished Junior Faculty Award for outstanding research, teaching and service, the General Education Teaching Award, and the Resident Faculty of the Year Award. Multimedia has also been a key part of his teaching: In a recent course on the American War in Viet Nam, he and his students created An Other War Memorial, which won a grant from the Fund for Innovative Undergraduate Teaching and the USC Provost’s Prize for Teaching with Technology.

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