Vietnamese/American's debut novel about Vietnam War's impact on his immigrant community wins Pulitzer Prize

Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction, author Viet Thanh Nguyen.

VIET THANH NGUYEN came to the United States from Vietnam as a 4-year old refugee in 1975 with his family.

Forty years later, he is the winner for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his debut novel "The Sympathizer," reported the Los Angeles Times yesterday (April 18).

Nguyen, a professor at the University of Southern California, is still getting over the shock of winning the highly prestigious and internationally recognized award.

“They say that 'The Sympathizer' really did win the Pulitzer Prize. Unless this is some cosmic virtual reality trick. I’m stunned.”

Here's how the Pulitzer committee described his novel:

A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties. In dialogue with but diametrically opposed to the narratives of the Vietnam War that have preceded it, this novel offers an important and unfamiliar new perspective on the war: that of a conflicted communist sympathizer.

 It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s astonishing novel takes us inside the mind of this double agent, a man whose lofty ideals necessitate his betrayal of the people closest to him. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

“I’ve been thinking about the Vietnam War all my life,” Nguyen told a reporter last year. “I started watching things like Apocalypse Now and reading books about the war when I was 10 or 11.”

When his agent encouraged him to write a novel, he knew exactly what he was going to write about.

“I knew immediately that I wanted to write a novel about a spy because I thought a spy story would be a good way to tell this history in an entertaining way. Much of this novel is based on things that really happened, so it was a matter of finding the character that would allow me to string together these events in the plot,” Nguyen said.

From his Facebook page, Nguyen, gives a shout-out to University of California, Berkeley's Ethnic Studies Department in this message he posted upon hearing the news that he had won the Pulitzer:

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