Melbourne Writers Festival | Viet Thanh Nguyen in Conversation with André Dao

With scorching wit and formal inventiveness, Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the story of his life in A Man of Two Faces. 

This highly original memoir takes readers from his success as a writer of novels like the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sympathizer  (now an HBO series starring Sandra Oh and Robert Downey Jr.) to migrating to California as a young refugee from the Vietnam War. In this conversation, Nguyen offers personal insights into the double identities he explores in his fiction; growing up exposed to degrading Hollywood depictions of war in his homeland while also observing the violence swept under the rug of American society. 

He speaks with André Dao about a triumphant and hugely entertaining autobiography that reckons with the ghosts of imperialism, family, memory and identity.