Viet Thanh Nguyen

Nguyen was born in Buôn Ma Thuột, Vietnam, and fled with his family to the United States in 1975 as a four-year-old refugee, settling in San Jose, California, where his parents ran one of the city's first Vietnamese grocery stores; he later earned a PhD at Berkeley and became a professor of English and American Studies at USC.

The Sympathizer (2015), his debut novel, narrated by an unnamed communist mole embedded among South Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles and later a Hollywood film production restaging the war, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and remade the Vietnam War novel as satire narrated from the losing, exiled side rather than the American one.

He followed it with a sequel, The Committed, and a memoir, A Man of Two Faces, alongside scholarly work on war memory and refugee literature, arguing consistently that 'all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.'