Born in Ban Me Thuot, Viet Nam, Nguyen came to the United States as a refugee in 1975 with his family and grew up in San Jose, California. Holder of an endowed professorship at the University of Southern California, he has become one of the nation’s most acclaimed writers and leading voices on issues of immigration, race, justice and representation.
His novel The Sympathizer (2015) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has been translated into many languages. He is also the author of a best-selling short story collection, The Refugees (2017), and scholarly works Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (2002) and the editor of Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (with Janet Hoskins, 2014) and The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (2018).
Nguyen is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and also writes regularly for the Washington Post andTIME on a range of urgent contemporary issues facing the nation.
