UC Berkeley graduate Viet Thanh Nguyen is this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his debut novel, The Sympathizer, a thriller/political satire about a double-agent who moves to Los Angeles after the Vietnam war.

The Pulitzer committee commended Nguyen’s book 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.”

Nguyen and his family came to the United States from Vietnam as refugees in 1975. After a few years in Pennsylvania, they moved to San Jose, California. As a student at UC Berkeley, he received bachelor’s degrees in English and ethnic studies in 1992 and a Ph.D. in English in 1997.

“As an undergrad I studied English and ethnic studies — English, because I loved literature,” he said this week in an interview with the Literary Hub website. “Ethnic studies revealed to me the possibility that literature could matter in terms of politics and social justice.”

Nguyen will give a reading of The Sympathizer at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 5, in Room 315 of Wheeler Hall. The program is sponsored by UC Berkeley’s English Department.

Nguyen is an associate professor of English, American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His stories have appeared in Best New American Voices, TriQuarterly, Narrative and the Chicago Tribune.