Viet Thanh Nguyen

Well, Dan, first of all, thanks for having me.

With the observations, well, you know, Cubans ended up in Florida, and most of the Vietnamese, or the largest community who fled from Vietnam in 1975, ended up in California.

So we're literally on opposite sides of the coast.

Both communities are dominated by their anti-communist factions.

And both have been using that kind of anti-communism, both to cement their cultural communities where they are, but also to advance their political interests in the United States.

And obviously the Cubans have been actually much more effective at doing that than the Vietnamese Americans have.

So we have a few politicians, but nothing on the scale of Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz.

And the ability of the Cuban exile community to determine a great degree of American politics is something that I think a certain portion of the Vietnamese community would envy.

I knew the book was good.

I thought the book was very good.

But winning a prize is completely arbitrary, as I'm sure you're aware.

So it's obviously nice to win prizes.

I would never turn down a prize, especially the Pulitzer, which completely transformed my life.

But now I serve on the Pulitzer board and we give out Pulitzer prizes.

And I've served in other juries for prizes.

And I'm quite aware that it's quite arbitrary in many ways.

So how did it change my life?

Well, I mean, the Pulitzer is, especially for fiction, for the novel, people care about it.

so just having winning that prize meant more eyeballs were on the book and the book had done very well it had been reviewed uniformly positively um it had made a big impact already but a big impact impact for literary work you know you're lucky if you sell 25 or 100 000 copies which the book did do but after the pulitzer it won it sold a million copies and it turned into a tv series you know for hbo i've been my trajectory has been completely transformed because of that book

I spent 17 years writing a short story collection called The Refugees before I wrote The Sympathizer.