Wednesday, April 20, 2016

2263. Tiểu sử nhà văn Nguyễn Thanh Việt - người được trao giải thưởng Pulitzer 2016 với cuốn tiểu thuyết “The Sympathizer”


Biography of the 2016 Pulitzer winner
Nguyễn Thanh Việt

Viet Thanh Nguyen 
Photo by BeBe Jacobs


The Professional

Viet Thanh Nguyen (*) is an associate professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002) and the novel The Sympathizer, from Grove/Atlantic (2015). The Sympathizer won the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for  Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Fiction from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association. It is also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, an Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. The novel made it to over thirty book-of-the-year lists, including The GuardianThe New York Times,  The Wall Street JournalAmazon.com, Slate.com, and The Washington Post.

His next book is Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of Warwhich is the critical bookend to a creative project whose fictional bookend is The SympathizerNothing Ever Dies examines how the so-called Vietnam War has been remembered by many countries and people, from the US to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and South Korea. Harvard University Press is publishing it in March 2016. Kirkus Reviews calls the book “a powerful reflection on how we choose to remember and forget.”

Along with Janet Hoskins, he co-edited Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (University of Hawaii Press, 2014). His articles have appeared in numerous journals and books, including PMLA, American Literary History, Western American Literature, positions: east asia cultures critique, The New Centennial Review, Postmodern Culture, the Japanese Journal of American Studies, and Asian American Studies After Critical Mass. Many of his articles can be downloaded here.

He has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2011-2012), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2008-2009) and the Fine Arts Work Center (2004-2005). He has also received residencies, fellowships,  and grants from the Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the James Irvine Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation.

His teaching and service awards include the Mellon Mentoring Award for Faculty Mentoring Graduate Students, the Albert S. Raubenheimer Distinguished Junior Faculty Award for outstanding research, teaching and service, the General Education Teaching Award, and the Resident Faculty of the Year Award. Multimedia has been a key part of his teaching. In a recent course on the American War in Viet Nam, he and his students created An Other War Memorial, which won a grant from the Fund for Innovative Undergraduate Teaching and the USC Provost’s Prize for Teaching with Technology.

His short fiction has been published in Manoa, Best New American Voices 2007, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross-Cultural Collision and Connection, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, the Chicago Tribune, and Gulf Coast, where his story won the 2007 Fiction Prize.

His writing has been translated into Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Spanish, and he has given invited lectures in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Germany. Download his full CV




The Personal

Viet was born in Ban Me Thuot, Viet Nam (now spelled Buon Me Thuot after 1975, a year which brought enormous changes to many things, including the Vietnamese language). He came to the United States as a refugee in 1975 with his family and was initially settled in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, one of four such camps for Vietnamese refugees. From there, he moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he lived until 1978.

Seeking better economic opportunities, his parents moved to San Jose, California, and opened one of the first Vietnamese grocery stores in the city. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, San Jose had not yet been transformed by the Silicon Valley economy, and was in many ways a rough place to live, at least in the downtown area where Viet’s parents worked. He commemorates this time in his short story “The War Years” (TriQuarterly 135/136, 2009).

Viet attended St. Patrick School and Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose. After high school, he briefly attended UC Riverside and UCLA before settling on UC Berkeley, where he graduated with degrees in English and ethnic studies. He stayed at Berkeley for a Ph.D. in English, moved to Los Angeles for a teaching position at the University of Southern California, and has been there ever since.

People not familiar with Vietnamese culture sometimes have a hard time pronouncing his surname. The wikipedia entry on Nguyen has audio pronunciations of the name in Vietnamese. He favors the southern pronunciation of his name, which with the full diacritical marks is Việt Thanh Nguyễn. For those in the United States, though, the Anglicization of Nguyen leads to further issues. Is it pronounced Noo-yen? Or Win? It’s never pronounced Ne-goo-yen. The Win version is closer to the Vietnamese and seems to be the favored choice for Vietnamese Americans.

Source: vietnguyen.info

(*) Nhà văn Nguyễn Thanh Việt - người được trao giải thưởng danh giá Pulitzer 2016 với cuốn tiểu thuyết “The Sympathizer”. Các bạn có thể vào Google tìm đọc các bản tin có liên quan viết bằng Tiếng Việt.