Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American author, well-known for his literary fiction novels. He was born in 1971 in Buon Me Thuot, Vietnam, to refugees from North Vietnam who had moved south in 1954. Following the Fall of Saigon, Nguyen's family fled to the United States, where they first lived in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, and then moved to Harrisburg in 1978, before settling in San Jose, California. Nguyen's family operated a grocery store in San Jose, and he attended St. Patrick's school and Bellarmine College Preparatory. He later graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and ethnic studies from the University of California in 1992. Nguyen went on to earn his Ph.D. in English from Berkeley in 1997.
Nguyen is a professor at the University of Southern California, where he teaches in the departments of English and American Studies and Ethnicity. He has received numerous fellowships and grants, including from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the James Irvine Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Creative Capital, and the Warhol Foundation. Nguyen's short fiction has been published in several notable publications, including Manoa, Best New American Voices 2007, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, and the Chicago Tribune. His writing has been translated into several languages, and he has given invited lectures in several countries, including China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Germany. Nguyen is currently working on an academic book titled War, Memory, Identity.