Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen (born February 13, 1971, Buon Me Thuot, South Vietnam [now in Vietnam]) is an American writer known for his novel The Sympathizer (2015), which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was adapted into a television miniseries in 2024. Nguyen’s work frequently centers on the topics of colonialism and imperialism, Asian American identities, and, in particular, the legacy and trauma of the Vietnam War (1954–75) among the Vietnamese diaspora. As Nguyen wrote in an essay in 2009:

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. So it is with what Americans call the “Vietnam War” and what Vietnamese call the “American War.”

Childhood and background

Nguyen spent his early childhood in the central highlands of the Republic of Vietnam, raised alongside his two older siblings by their devout Roman Catholic parents, Joseph Thanh Nguyen (born Nguyễn Ngọc Thanh) and Linda Kim Nguyen (born Nguyễn Thị Bãy). Joseph and Linda Nguyen had migrated from North Vietnam to South Vietnam as refugees in 1954 (when the country was partitioned) before settling in Buon Me Thuot and opening a fabric and tailoring business.

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In early 1975 North Vietnamese troops invaded South Vietnam. A four-year-old Nguyen, along with his parents and brother, fled first Buon Me Thuot, then Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) a month later. “I think the earliest possible memories I have were probably on the boat leaving Saigon,” Nguyen said in a 2019 interview with the West Point Center for Oral History. The Nguyen family traveled by ship to the United States, where they settled at a refugee camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. The camp required refugees to obtain an American sponsor in order to leave; unusually, the Nguyens had different sponsors. “One sponsor took my parents,” Nguyen said in 2019. “One sponsor took my…10-year-old brother, and one sponsor took four-year-old me.” Though their parents regained custody of Nguyen within a few months of finding work and housing near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Nguyen’s older brother was not reunited with the family for a couple years. (Nguyen’s 16-year-old sister remained in Vietnam to look after the family’s property. It would be nearly 30 years before Nguyen saw her again.)

In 1978 the family moved from Harrisburg to San Jose, California, where Nguyen’s parents opened one of the area’s first Vietnamese grocery stores. Nguyen immersed himself in literature, television shows, and film. He recalled to the West Point Center for Oral History:

I was sort of a typical American boy who liked war stories, liked to watch these war movies on TV, and liked to read war books, and so I was drawn to this genre.

Education and first publications

After earning a bachelor’s degree in English and ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992, followed by a doctorate in English from the same university in 1997, Nguyen began working as a professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

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He also began to publish both nonfiction and fiction. His first book, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (2002), examines Asian American literature and argues that the “idealization of Asian America” has prevented Asian Americans from engaging critically with capitalist exploitation of racial identity.

Meanwhile, Nguyen’s short fiction was starting to appear in publications such as Best New American Voices and Narrative magazine. His story “The Americans,” published in the Chicago Tribune in 2010, was a finalist in that year’s Nelson Algren Short Story Awards.

The Sympathizer

In 2015 Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer, was published. Set during the Fall of Saigon (1975) and the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the story follows a half-French, half-Vietnamese double agent working as an aide within South Vietnam’s secret police while secretly reporting to a handler in communist North Vietnam. After being reluctantly evacuated to the United States by the CIA, the unnamed narrator dabbles in the Hollywood film business before working as a double (or perhaps triple) agent as his former contacts plot another invasion. The Sympathizer was lauded by The New York Times for “de-Americaniz[ing] the portrayal of the war.” Along with the Pulitzer Prize, Nguyen received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America, and many other honors.

The Sympathizer draws on Nguyen’s family’s experience fleeing Vietnam as well as his longtime interest in fiction about the Vietnam War. In a 2022 New York Times opinion piece denouncing book bans, Nguyen recalled reading American author and Vietnam War veteran Larry Heinemann’s 1977 novel Close Quarters when he was young and feeling disturbed by the way the U.S. soldiers in the book dehumanized Vietnamese people. He came away from the experience “hating both [the book] and Mr. Heinemann.” Years later, while writing The Sympathizer, Nguyen reread Close Quarters and realized that he had “misconstrued Mr. Heinemann’s intentions. He wasn’t endorsing what he depicted. He wanted to show that war brutalized soldiers, as well as the civilians caught in their path.”

The experience inspired Nguyen’s own path to writing war fiction. “I believed stories had the power to save me,” he wrote. “[Heinemann’s] novel taught me that stories also had the power to destroy me. I was driven to become a writer because of the complex power of stories.”

In 2024 Nguyen served as an executive producer on a television miniseries adaptation of The Sympathizer that aired on the streaming platform HBO. Created by acclaimed South Korean director and producer Park Chan-Wook and Canadian director and actor Don McKellar, The Sympathizer stars Hoa Xuande, Robert Downey, Jr., Fred Nguyen Khan, and Sandra Oh and features a cameo by Nguyen as a photographer.

Other books

Nguyen followed The Sympathizer with the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016), an examination of how the Vietnam War is remembered, particularly in the United States and Vietnam. It was a finalist for a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2017 he published The Refugees, a collection of short stories about immigrants and refugees that Nguyen had written over a period of 20 years.

In 2021 Nguyen published a sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed, which follows the first novel’s titular spy as a refugee in Paris. His “meta-narrative” A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial was published two years later. (Its title comes from the first sentence of The Sympathizer.) He has also written the children’s books Chicken of the Sea (2019; authored with his son, Ellison Nguyen) and Simone (2024). In 2025 he published the essay collection To Save and Destroy: Writing as an Other.

Political views

Nguyen has been outspoken about many political issues, including censorship, racial identity, the U.S. military-industrial complex, and the Israel-Hamas War. In his 2022 New York Times op-ed about book bans, he said that he encountered many difficulties getting The Sympathizer published in Vietnam, “because of its depiction of the war and its aftermath.” Nguyen’s memoir, A Man of Two Faces, explores not only his own family’s experience as refugees but also the broader experience of refugees in the United States, and it argues that their lives are more complex and contradictory than such concepts as the “American Dream^TM,” as he calls it. In the book he also makes frequent reference to U.S. Pres. Donald Trump and his policies, yet he blacks out Trump’s name upon every mention.

In late 2023, shortly after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, Nguyen was one of more than 700 writers who signed an open letter, published in the London Review of Books, that referred to Israel as an “occupying power” and demanded “an end to the violence and destruction in Palestine.” The letter decried “the financial and political support of Western powers” of Israel’s “current actions in Gaza” and called for a ceasefire. His signature led to the cancellation of a literary event featuring Nguyen and fellow author Min Jin Lee (who did not sign the open letter) at 92NY (formerly the 92nd Street Y) in New York City. The event was rescheduled to a Manhattan bookstore, but Nguyen and many other writers criticized 92NY’s cancellation as a form of censorship. He continued to speak about his views on Palestine, especially during the book tour for To Save and Destroy, which includes a chapter on the Israel-Hamas War and draws correlations between opposition to that war and protests against the Vietnam War.