Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Race, Displacement, and the Public Intellectual: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen

 Anthony Ocampo interviews Viet Thanh Nguyen about race and their intellectual worlds in this interview for Contexts. Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese American novelist and academic whose books include The Refugees, Nothing Ever Dies, Race and Resistance, and a new edited collection, The Displaced, alongside his best-selling, Pulitzer Prize winning book The Sympathizer. Nguyen, University Professor of English, American […]

Sống sót / Survival

In this article for the Daily Bruin, Kristie-Valerie Hoang interviews Viet Thanh Nguyen and reports on the Vietnamese-American identity and struggle in California. December 1978. Quyen Di Chuc Bui spent three nights in a Santa Ana parking lot when he first moved to California. During his arrival to the Golden State, the winter nightfall and […]

Victims of War, and Now Victims of the Trump Administration

Viet Thanh Nguyen and Eric Tang discuss the deportation of Vietnamese refugees under the Trump administration in this Opinion piece for the New York Times.  What is an appropriate punishment for a crime? The plight of thousands of Vietnamese refugees convicted of crimes in the United States and now threatened with detention or deportation demands an answer […]

He portrays a fragmented Vietnam and refugee life in the United States

Maria Edström reviews The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen for Göteborgs-Posten. Viet Thanh Nguygens prisade debutroman Sympatisören berättar om det “amerikanska kriget” ur en vietnamesisk spions synvinkel. Maria Edström läser en överlastad roman som lyfter först när den skildrar ett förött flyktingliv i USA. ”Vietnam är nära, utanför ditt fönster” sjöng den svenska Vietnamrörelsens sånggrupp […]

General Education S2E14: High Frequency: Viet Thanh Nguyen

On the last episode of General Education by Daily Trojan, Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses the Asian American identity, refugees, and the USC community. Karan talks with University professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen for this season’s final episode of General Education. Nguyen will start teaching at USC again next semester, after being on […]

I Love America. That’s Why I Have to Tell the Truth About It

Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, talks about immigration in America and his experiences as a Vietnamese refugee in this essay for TIME. Love it or leave it. Have you heard someone say this? Or have you said it? Anyone who has heard these five words knows what it means, because it almost always refers to America. Anyone who has heard this sentence knows it is a loaded gun, pointed […]

Wesley Yang and the Search for Asian-American Visibility

Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses Wesley Yang’s collection of essays, The Souls of Yellow Folk, for the New York Times Book Review.  THE SOULS OF YELLOW FOLK Essays By Wesley Yang 215 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $24.95. My disappointment with Wesley Yang’s collection of essays, “The Souls of Yellow Folk,” stems from the difference between […]

Could Asian-Americans Turn Orange County Blue?

Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses Asian-American influence in Orange County for the 2018 midterm elections in this op-ed for New York Times.  When I was a freshman at the University of California, Riverside, in 1988, I drove a carload of excited fellow Vietnamese students to nearby Orange County. It was only 13 years after the end […]

Bill Ruehlmann: In “The Displaced,” we see immigrants, see ourselves

Bill Ruehlmann reviews The Displaced by Viet Thanh Nguyen for The Virginian-Pilot.  Sometimes a true story by a complete stranger can hit you like a stomach punch. There are 18 of them in “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives” (Abrams Press, 190 pp., $25), edited by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, also recipient […]

Viet Thanh Nguyen on trauma, displacement, and identifying as a refugee

Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses the role of trauma for refugees as well as his personal experiences in this interview with Ravi Gurumurthy and Grant Gordon for Displaced.     Here is the transcript: Ravi Gurumurthy: (music). Ravi Gurumurthy: Hello and welcome to Displaced. I’m Ravi Gurumurthy. Grant Gordon: And I’m Grant Gordon. Ravi Gurumurthy: And […]

Viet Thanh Nguyen: ‘As a refugee, I’ll tell you how it is’

Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses his personal experiences and the state of refugees with Angelo Mastrandrea in this interview for il manifesto. There is an English version below the original article.  Lattes, premiati Yu Hua e Antunes Lo scrittore cinese Yu Hua è stato il vincitore del Premio Bottari Lattes Grinzane 2018 per la sezione Il germoglio, […]

Pulitzer Prize-winning author talks immigration, refugees at UMD lecture

Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks at the University of Maryland about refugees and their stories in this article for The Diamondback. A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist urged University of Maryland students on Tuesday to seek out and share the stories of refugees and other groups who often feel unwanted in their home country and in the United […]

Viet Thanh Nguyen and Vu Tran: “Narrative Plentitude” | Talks at Google

Viet Thanh Nguyen and Vu Tran discuss narrative plentitude and Asian representation in popular culture during this Talk at Google. Here is the transcript: Viet Nguyen: Thanks for the introduction. Thanks to Barb and to Jinja for bringing us both out here. And I just want to say, you guys have a great building, workspace, […]

TBS eFM This Morning Seoul

Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses his personal experiences as a refugee and the current refugee crisis in this interview with eFM This Morning Seoul.    Here is a transcript: Speaker 1: (Singing) Alex Jensen: Now, to celebrate our new fall season, we have a special guest. An English professor and novelist, Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won […]