The Phil Lind Initiative: Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s writing is bold, elegant, and fiercely honest. His remarkable debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize, was a Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner, and made the finalist list for the PEN/Faulkner award. Coming to the US as refugees during the Vietnam War in 1975, he was driven by lack of representation to write about the war from a Vietnamese perspective—globally reimagining what we thought we knew about the conflict.

The 2024 Phil Lind Initiative series Pop Politics is a novel and nuanced exploration of how pop culture has influenced and shaped how we understand, experience, and practice politics in the United States. This dynamic series will feature talks with artists who have used their craft to take a political stance. Voicing the experience of refugees and the LGBTQ2+ community, demanding climate justice, questioning income inequality and uplifting marginalized communities, these speakers have tackled many of the defining debates of American political life and used their creative outputs as acts of connection, of resistance, and of survival. Presented by the UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs in partnership with the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. Read more at https://lindinitiative.ubc.ca/

Event page URL: https://lindinitiative.ubc.ca/speakers/viet-thanh-nguyen/