About the APSI distinguished keynote

Through this event, attendees will deepen their knowledge of countries and cultures in Asia. Each annual keynote talk provides a specialized platform for developing and discussing ideas beyond the academy, raising the profile of Asian Studies and related disciplines at Duke by maintaining a deliberate focus on the Asian region, and expanding the academic and intellectual networks available to members of the Duke community.

The 2026 keynote talk will feature Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen:

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About the speaker:

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association.

His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He was a professor at the University of Southern California for many years, but stepped down from his professorship to become a Writer in Residence at USC. 

He has been interviewed by Tavis Smiley, Charlie Rose, Seth Meyers, and Terry Gross, among many others. He is also the author of the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer. He is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston. 

He co-authored Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book, with his then six-year-old son, Ellison, and his most recent novel is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer. HBO turned The Sympathizer into a TV series in 2024, directed by Park Chan-wook. Nguyen’s last two books were Simone, a children’s book illustrated by Minnie Phan, and To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, from Harvard University Press in 2025.

^{biography from the author's webpage}

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