Professor wins 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for debut novel ‘The Sympathizer’

On Monday afternoon, the winners of the 2016 Pulitzer Prizes were announced, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, the author of The Sympathizer, took home the coveted Prize for Fiction.

Nguyen took home the prestigious prize for his debut novel, "The Sympathizer," published by Grove Press.

"Thanks for all your good wishes," Nguyen wrote on Facebook. "I double checked with real people in my publisher's office...and they say that The Sympathizer really did win the Pulitzer Prize. Unless this is some cosmic virtual reality trick. I'm stunned."

The Sympathizer is "the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties." The novel follows a double agent in 1975 Vietnam, and later in Los Angeles. It's billed as a spy novel, an "astute exploration of extreme politics," and a love story all rolled into one.

The Pulitzer committee lauded "The Sympathizer" as "a layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a 'man of two minds' -- and two countries, Vietnam and the United States."

Notably, Nguyen is an immigrant. He was born in Vietnam, and came to the United States as a refugee with his family in 1975.

He graduated with honors from the University of California, Berkeley with degrees in English and Ethnic Studies. He later pursued his PhD at the same institution, graduating with a doctorate in English in 1997. In addition to teaching and writing, he also serves as cultural critic-at-large for The Los Angeles Times and editor ofdiaCRITICS, a blog for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network.

Nguyen has penned academic books and works of short fiction in the past, but The Sympathizer is his first novel. The novel won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize in 2015 and it is a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction.

Nguyen's latest book is the nonfiction study "Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War," published earlier this month by Harvard University Press. He is at work on a sequel to "The Sympathizer."

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr won the pulitzer prize for fiction in 2015, and Donna Tartt won the award in 2014 for her book The Goldfinch.

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