Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen 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.