Viet Thanh Nguyen is a literary scholar, writer, and professor at the University of Southern California. Nguyen explores how depictions of the Vietnam War, and of the refugees it displaced, often fail to capture the full humanity and inhumanity, the sacrifices and savagery, of participants on opposing sides of the conflict.

His bestselling novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. With his collection of short stories, The Refugees, Nguyen continues his exploration of the tensions, traumas and conflicting loyalties that endure far beyond a war’s end.