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In the Studio: Viet Thanh Nguyen: The art of memoir

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Viet Thanh Nguyen: The art of memoir

12/01/2021 GMT

BBC World Service - In the Studio, Viet Thanh Nguyen: The art of memoir

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author takes on a new, deeply personal challenge

In a departure from fiction, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author takes on a new, deeply personal challenge.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen brings listeners inside the writing of his new book: a memoir, of sorts. In a departure from fiction, the Vietnamese-American writer takes on a new, deeply personal challenge. 

When he was only four years old, Viet’s family fled the war in Vietnam, eventually settling in California. Too young to remember these events, his writing often explores secondhand memories of war, inherited trauma and refugee experiences. 

Eliza Lomas catches up with Viet a few times over a twelve-month period: in the early months of 2020, again in the summer, and finally towards the end of the year. Throughout this time, Viet is finishing the final edits on his forthcoming novel, The Committed, and dives into writing his next book. 

This journey requires him to dig deep into his past and make difficult decisions about what to include and how personal he should be. Sometimes he gets so stuck all he can do is change the font on the manuscript. Yet he also has success, some days reaching his target of 1000 words a day.

For Viet, writing is a political act: he believes that sharing his family’s experiences is crucial to reshaping American representations of Vietnam and of refugees more widely. Central to his philosophy as a refugee author is to “write with all the privileges of the majority, but with the humility of a minority.” 

Produced and presented by Eliza Lomas

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