Viet Thanh Nguyen has been awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his astonishing debut novel, The Sympathizer.
Part satire, part espionage thriller and part historical fiction, The Sympathizer opens at the end of the Vietnam War and follows a communist spy as he travels between Vietnam and America – eventually ending up on a film set that could have been where Francis Ford Coppola filmed Apocalypse Now.
Nguyen, who lives in Los Angeles, was born in Vietnam. His family came to the United States as refugees in 1975. When speaking of his Prize winning work, he said it grew out of a desire to, “write a novel that would allow me to explore the complexity of the Vietnam War, through all eyes; it’s meant to be entertaining and provocative”.
The two finalists in the fiction category were Kelly Link for her inventive, thrilling story collection Get In Trouble, and Margaret Verble for her moving debut novel, Maud’s Line.
Other winning books from this year’s Pulitzer Prizes include…
- Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles (History)
- Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (Biography or Autobiography)
- Ozone Journal by Peter Balakian (Poetry)
- Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick (General Non-Fiction)
We were also delighted to see the Prize for Criticism go to New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum, and the Prize for Drama go to Lin-Manuel Miranda for his Broadway sensation Hamilton.
