Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1971. After the fall of Saigon in 1975 he and his family fled to the United States as refugees. Nguyen's 2015 novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the ALA, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. In addition, The Sympathizer was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, among others. Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. His 2016 collection of critical essays, Nothing Ever Dies, was a finalist for the National Book Award and is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction. His first collection of short stories, The Refugees, was published in 2017 and was an instant New York Times Bestseller. He lives in Los Angeles.
... The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives seeks to give voice to the experience of being forced to leave one place and seek a home elsewhere, and challenge the political identity given to refugees by virtue of being unwanted. --Bay Area News Group There is no single refugee story, and as the editor of The Displaced, a collection of refugee writers exploring and reflecting on their experiences, Viet Thanh Nguyen gives these stories room to breath and unfurl. --The Millions With tens of millions of people fleeing persecution and conflict today as refugees, according to the United Nations, these voices and stories are more timely than ever. --NBC News online