Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen by UCI Illuminations ♥ ★

Please join us for a stirring and provocative evening of fiction, history and commentary with Pulitzer-Prize winning author and scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen, introduced by Professor Linda Vo (Asian American Studies).

This event supports our year-long theme, “For a more perfect union?” and contributes to campus-wide discussions of wisdom in the world. How does literature help us reimagine community in a changing world? How is literature a conduit of wisdom that attunes us to ancestors, history, the environment, other people, and ourselves?

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a University Professor, Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. His novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed, was released in March 2021. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has been interviewed by Tavis Smiley, Charlie Rose, Seth Meyers, and Terry Gross, among many others. He is also the author of the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer. He is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. His most recent publication is Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his six-year-old son, Ellison. His next book is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer, coming out in March 2021.

Co-sponsored by the UCI Humanities Center, Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion, Office of Inclusive Excellence, and UCI’s Southeast Asian Archive.