Made possible by the Drue Heinz Trust

Bold, elegant, and fiercely honest, Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. His collection of stories, The Refugees, gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth.

The Refugees is a collection of perfectly formed stories exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration. The Refugees is a beautifully written and sharply observed book about the aspirations of those who leave one country for another.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America, His novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War is a nonfiction exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War.