Viet Thanh Nguyen is a 2017 MacArthur fellow for fiction and nonfiction

“The immigrant has always been an ambivalent figure in the United States,� writer Viet Thanh Nguyen told the Los Angeles Times last year. “The immigrant has always served as a source of rejuvenation for the country and a source of fear.� Examining that ambivalence is central to his work, across forms and genres.

Nguyen received the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his first novel, “The Sympathizer�; his nonfiction book “Nothing Ever Dies� was named a finalist for the National Book Award later that year. This week, Nguyen receives another honor: a MacArthur Fellowship, often called the “genius grant.�

An L.A. Times critic at large and a USC professor, Nguyen’s work has been recognized for its powerful exploration of the immigrant experience. He tackles the particular tensions of being both of a place and outside of it.

“Nothing Ever Dies,� probes the conflict that Americans call the Vietnam War and that Vietnamese call the American War, and his nameless protagonist in “The Sympathizer,� a sharp political satire of American involvement in Vietnam, calls himself “a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.� In an essay for The Times, Nguyen explained that “often the outsiders see us better than we on the inside can see ourselves.�

Nguyen came to the United States at age 4. His family settled in San Jose, where his parents opened one of the first Vietnamese grocery stores in the city, a setting which he fictionalized in his most recent book, 2017’s “The Refugees.� In a review for The Times, Karen Long wrote that the short-story collection “casts a formidable spell, especially at this political moment when refugees are both a lightning rod and an abstraction.�

Nguyen has said he went through 50 drafts of a single story in “The Refugees,� and over a decade of research went into “Nothing Ever Dies.� As a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, he will receive a no-strings-attached $625,000 grant to help free him to develop future writing. He is currently working on a sequel to “The Sympathizer.�

“I feel a deep sense of humility; because I know there are many other writers in the contemporary moment who deserve this award, and many writers in the past who should have gotten it who didn’t,� Nguyen told The Times’ Deb Vankin after learning of the MacArthur Fellowship. “And I think about those writers who came at a time when the award didn’t exist whose work made my own possible. It makes me appreciate this even more.�

[email protected]

Twitter: @agathafrenchy