CHARLESTON — Nationally renowned novelist and author Viet Thanh Nguyen will deliver the West Virginia Humanities Council’s annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities at Capitol Theater in Charleston this Thursday, Oct. 23, at 7:30 p.m. Nguyen, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2016 for his debut novel, The Sympathizer, has written extensively about the legacy and memory of the Vietnam War.

“The McCreight Lecture is all about creating opportunities for West Virginians to share the room with great authors and scholars like Viet Thanh Nguyen,” says the Council’s Executive Director Eric Waggoner. “Nguyen’s life and writing speak to individual and shared American experiences of the past 50 years, including the myriad ways the Vietnam War has shaped our nation.”

In 1975, Viet Thanh Nguyen was only four years old when Saigon fell to Northern Vietnamese communist troops, forcing his family to flee to the United States — along with hundreds of thousands of other refugees. Their first home on American soil was a refugee camp in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Young Viet was separated from his parents and placed with a sponsor family, but they were eventually reunited in San Jose, California, where Nguyen grew up.

“Mr. Nguyen’s work touches on so many facets of what America is, and has been for the past 50 years, since the end of the Vietnam War. As with all wars, its direct and peripheral effects last for decades,” says Waggoner. “Nguyen’s writing speaks to Americans of every post-war generation and walk of life.”

The Sympathizer was adapted into a critically acclaimed HBO miniseries starring Robert Downey Jr. in 2024. Nguyen’s other works include The Committed (a sequel to The Sympathizer); The Refugees, a short story anthology; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War; and his autobiography, A Man of Two Faces. His most recent work, To Save and To Destroy, is a compilation of his 2024 Norton Lectures at Harvard University. 

The West Virginia Humanities Council has hosted its annual McCreight Lecture for over 40 years. The program honors the memory of Betsy Keadle McCreight, a founding Board member who believed that the humanities were a necessary source of wisdom and vision at the heart of a democratic society.