Pulitzer Winner Visits Kenyon

Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Sympathizer,” met with students and held a reading on campus sponsored by The Kenyon Review.

By Ryan E. Smith
Date

Viet Thanh Nguyen met with students in the “Literary Citizenship” class led by Nicole Terez Dutton.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Sympathizer,” shared his work, process, and professional path during two recent events at Kenyon.

Sponsored by The Kenyon Review, his visit included a public reading of parts of his award-winning debut novel — later adapted into an HBO limited series — as well as his most recent work, “To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other.”

The next day, Nguyen met with students in the “Literary Citizenship” class led by Nicole Terez Dutton, editor of The Kenyon Review. 

Nguyen’s trip to Gambier was arranged in conjunction with him receiving the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement during a November event in New York City. Established in 2002, the award recognizes writers whose influence has shaped the American literary landscape. 

The distinguished author — who was born in Vietnam and arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975 — spoke to Dutton’s students about his role supporting the next generation of writers as cofounder of the nonprofit Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and spent more than an hour answering questions about his approach to writing and his career.

Now a professor at the University of Southern California, Nguyen talked about his longstanding desire to incorporate his political activism into his literature. “The Sympathizer,” published in 2015, centers on a spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army who immigrates to the United States after the fall of Saigon and continues to report on its remnants.

“For me, the notions of what I wanted to write about were completely inseparable from the idea of political change,” he told the class. “Spy novels are very political and I’m a very political writer, and I wanted to choose a genre that would allow me to be political and entertaining at the same time.”

But being political means being informed, exposing yourself to a diversity of perspectives, and creating a space where you might be changed by those perspectives, Nguyen stressed.

“It’s so crucial never to stop learning, never to stop interrogating what it is that you may not understand and what you don’t know,” he said. “Meeting people who are not like you, having conversations with them, being challenged by them — and vice versa — is absolutely critical.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen

His work includes the short story collection “The Refugees;” the National Book Award finalist “Nothing Ever Dies;” a sequel to “The Sympathizer” called “The Committed;” and a children’s book, “Chicken of the Sea,” that he wrote with his then-6-year-old son.

A MacArthur “genius grant” fellow who pursued a doctorate in English rather than a Master of Fine Arts, Nguyen used his time with students to discuss the different academic paths and his belief in an education that goes beyond the nuts and bolts of writing. 

“I remember being taught about things like perspective, point of view, word choice … but very few people talked about history and politics and theory, which to me are also really crucial questions for anybody who’s been marginalized in some way,” he said. “As a writer, it’s crucial not just to learn the technical issues of how to construct a sentence or a plot, but how to think about history.”

He also talked about his approach to writing as a member of a minority group.

“People in the majority have the privilege of not translating and not explaining their experience,” he said. “For many of us, as so-called minority writers, (it’s) not that we don’t have to write about whatever it means to be a minority, but that we write about it with all the privilege and freedom and power of the majority.”

Dutton said Nguyen’s willingness to share his experiences, insights and hard-earned lessons was particularly relevant to students in her class, which explores the question of how to make a life in literature.

“He was very generous with the kind of details that he shared about his personal narrative,” she said. “People need for you to be authentic with them and for you to be unsparing at times, too, and really give them these lessons.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen took part in a public reading in Brandi Recital Hall.
Viet Thanh Nguyen took part in a public reading in Brandi Recital Hall.

Will Madden ’26, a double major in English and sociology who has applied to grad school programs in poetry, said Nguyen’s visit — which was made possible with support from the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture Fund — left a deep impression.

“I was telling my parents and my friends that it feels like Toni Morrison is at our school. He’s one of my biggest idols,” he said. “Getting advice from him and getting his perspective is just life-changing.”