Biography

Viet Thanh Nguyen (Vietnamese: Nguyễn Thanh Việt; born March 13, 1971) is a South Vietnamese-born American professor and novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Nguyen's debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and many other accolades. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. Nguyen is a regular contributor, op-ed columnist for The New York Times, covering immigration, refugees, politics, culture, and Southeast Asia. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2020 was elected as the first Asian American member of the Pulitzer Prize Board in its 103-year-history. In the teaching field, in 2023, Nguyen is also the first Asian American to headline the Charles Eliot Norton Lecture Series at Harvard University.