Viet Thanh
Nguyen

Hear celebrated author Viet Thanh Nguyen, hailed as “a conscience of American literature” (The New Yorker), discuss his new work with writer and broadcaster Benjamin Law.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

VIET THANH NGUYEN
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. His other books are The Committed, a short story collection, The Refugees, Nothing Ever Dies and Race and Resistance.

He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his son, Ellison. He is a University Professor at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.

With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.

Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.

ABOUT THE HOST

BENJAMIN LAW
Benjamin Law is an Australian author, screenwriter and journalist. He is best known for his books The Family Law, a family memoir published in 2010, and the TV series of the same name. He hosts the radio programme and podcast Stop Everything! for ABC Radio National.

Law is founder member of the Australian Writers’ Guild’s Diversity and Inclusion Action Committee, along with Kodie Bedford and others.