Orange: Sydney Writers Festival: Livestream and Local - Viet Thanh Nguyen

"I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces," begins Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut novel, The Sympathizer, the internationally acclaimed bestseller recently adapted into an HBO series starring Sandra Oh and Robert Downey Jr.

This duality is also at the heart of Viet's highly original memoir, A Man of Two Faces, which details with sardonic wit and incisive analysis the double consciousness of a Vietnamese refugee growing up in North America.

Listen to the clebrated author, hailed as "a conscience of American literature" (The New Yorker), in conversation with Benjamin Law.

Viet Thanh Nguyen appears at the SWF thanks to the support of Fiona and Matthew Playfair.

About the author:

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. His other books are The Committed, a short story collection, The Refugees, Nothing Ever Dies and Race and Resistance. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his son, Ellison. He is a University Professor at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.

Hosted by Benjamin Law

Benjamin Law is an Australian writer and braodcaster. He’s the author of The Family Law (2010), Gaysia (2013), the Quarterly Essay Moral Panic 101 (2017) and editor of Growing Up Queer in Australia (2019).

Benjamin is also an AWGIE Award-winning screenwriter. He’s the co-executive producer, co-creator and co-writer of the Netflix comedy-drama Wellmania (2023), playwright of Melbourne Theatre Company’s sold-out play Torch the Place (2020), and creator and co-writer of three seasons of the award-winning SBS/Hulu/Comedy Central Asia TV series The Family Law (2016–2019). He has a PhD in creative writing and cultural studies from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which awarded him the Creative Industries Faculty Outstanding Alumni Award in 2020.