The awards keep coming: Viet Thanh Nguyen wins Edgar Award

Allison Flood/The Guardian

Last week, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel won the Pulitzer, the top award in American fiction, praised as “a layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a ‘man of two minds’ – and two countries, Vietnam and the United States”.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Sympathizer” wins the Edgar Award for best first novel.

On winning the Pulitzer, Nguyen posted on his website that “within minutes of getting it, I knew that I owed tremendous thanks to everyone who has gone before me in the great, ongoing struggle for social justice, for peace, for genuine equality, for representation for all at every level of every society.

“I think of the enormous debts I owe to everyone who fought for civil rights, for radical power, for economic equity, and how all these issues are inseparable from justice in the literary world. No minority writer, no writer of colour, can claim that he or she accomplished anything purely on their own merit. We all owe so much to the collective struggles and activists that preceded us, that laid the foundations for our individual achievement, to everyone lucky enough to be remembered and so many who have been forgotten,” he wrote. 

Traditionally, the Edgar awards judges do not elaborate on the reasons for their choices, but the Guardian’s review found that it was “a bold, artful and globally minded re-imagining of the Vietnam war and its interwoven private and public legacies”.

To read more, click here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/29/viet-thanh-nguyen-edgar-prize-to-pulitzer-the-sympathizer