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 Guardian, The New York Times, The
Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com, Slate.com,
and The Washington Post.
His
next book is Nothing
Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, which is the critical
bookend to a creative project whose fictional bookend is The Sympathizer. Nothing
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.
