Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen (Vietnamese: Nguyễn Thanh Việt; born March 13, 1971) is a Vietnamese-American novelist and non-fiction writer. He teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his first novel, "The Sympathizer". That book also won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. He was given a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. Nguyen writes opinion essays about immigration, refugees, politics, culture and South East Asia for The New York Times.
Nguyen was born in Ban Mê Thuột, Viet Nam (now spelled Buôn Mê Thuột). He came to the United States as a refugee in 1975 with his family. At first, they settled in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. That was one of four places in the U. S. for Vietnamese refugees to live. After that, they moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His family lived there until 1978 when they moved to San Jose, California.
After high school in San Jose, Nguyen went to college at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated with degrees in English and ethnic studies. He stayed at Berkeley for a Ph.D. in English. Then he moved to Los Angeles to teach at the University of Southern California.