Viet Thanh Nguyen

I think because, who am I to brag to my parents about winning a stupid prize that they'd never even heard of?

The next day, I'm on the road still dealing with the outcome of this prize, and my father calls me.

And he says, the villagers in Vietnam called.

You won the Pulitzer Prize.

And his voice is like shaking with happiness.

So that's how the news circulated.

Obviously, you know, that circulation, it was being told to him by his own family from Vietnam.

He knew that was a big deal at that point.

It's about the power of storytelling to do exactly what we've been talking about, to save us and to destroy us.

And I go through many examples of books and stories and poems and writers that have been meaningful to me.

But what I have always believed is that literature is a part of the world.

Literature is not just storytelling.

Storytelling is fundamental to who we are.

Okay, and literature and books, we've never given that up.

And so literature and books and art are a part of the world, and to save and to destroy that book is very much not just about the writers and the art, but about the worlds in which these writers and their art emerged from, about all the histories of colonialism and racism and war, but also of beauty that have produced them in me as well.