Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese American novelist, essayist and literary scholar. Born in Vietnam and raised in the United States, he studied English and ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, later earning a doctorate in English. His academic work has focused on Asian American literature, race, war, memory and the Vietnamese diaspora.

Nguyen writes fiction, criticism and nonfiction. Across these forms, he returns to refugees, colonial histories, political commitment and the stories nations tell about war. His prose often joins intellectual argument to dark comedy and the momentum of crime or espionage fiction. In The Sympathizer, an unnamed communist double agent recounts his escape from Saigon, his life among Vietnamese exiles in Los Angeles and his work as an adviser on a Hollywood war film.

The Sympathizer, Nguyen’s debut novel, received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Its narrator’s story continues in The Committed, set largely in Paris. Nguyen also wrote the story collection The Refugees and the nonfiction study Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. The Sympathizer became an HBO limited series in 2024, co-created by Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar.

Start with The Sympathizer. It introduces Nguyen’s central concerns through a suspenseful confession shaped by satire, betrayal and competing versions of history. Readers drawn to its narrator can continue directly with The Committed.