Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

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Viet Thanh Nguyen at Kansas State University

Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen and his family came to the United States as refugees during the Vietnam War in 1975. 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, globally reimagining what we thought we knew about the conflict. The New York Times says that his debut novel, The Sympathizer, “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 new light.” The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize, was a Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner, and made the finalist list for the PEN/Faulkner award. 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. The audacious novel has been described by The Guardian as having “Whitman-like multiplicity” as it “reads the absolute opposite of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.”The Committed, the long-awaited follow-up to The Sympathizer, was published in 2021 and has been called “a masterwork” and “revelatory.”

Sponsored by the Student Association of Graduates in English (SAGE), the Department of English, and the K-State Student Governing Association (SGA).

Viet Thanh Nguyen at Kansas State University

 

Date

Oct 22 2021
Event ended

Time

4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Location

Online Event