Next year's keynote speaker will be... VIET THANH NGUYEN!
We are beyond thrilled to announce that the 2022 Unbound keynote speaker will be Pulitzer-prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen.
The event will take place on Friday, April 22, at the Missouri Theatre. As with all Unbound events, tickets will be completely free. As in previous years, we will make them available online well in advance - probably before the end of the year. And we promise that we’ll give you lots of notice as to exactly when they’ll become available - in recent years tickets to the keynote go very quickly (think hours, not days!) and so you will want to ready to reserve your seats as soon as you’re able. Watch out for more details - the best way of staying up to date is to subscribe to our newsletter - which you can do at the bottom of this page.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed. His other books are a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. Viet has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his six-year-old son, Ellison. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature 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.
Viet will be interviewed by the brilliant poet, Patrick Rosal. Pat electrified audiences at our very first Unbound Book Festival back in 2016 and we are delighted to welcome him back. We can’t think of a more dynamic and exciting conversational pair to celebrate Unbound’s first in-person event since 2019. It is going to be a night to remember!