The Center for Fiction has selected Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, The Sympathizer (Grove Press), as the winner of the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
The Sympathizer is the story of a Vietnamese spy who lived in Los Angeles and went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communists.
The annual prize includes a $10,000 cash award. Tiphanie Yanique, winner of last year’s prize, presented the award at The Center for Fiction’s Annual Benefit and Awards Dinner in New York City on December 8.
The 2015 finalists for the award included: After the Parade by Lori Ostlund(Scribner); Against the Country by Ben Metcalf (Random House); Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam (Penguin Books); The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma (Little, Brown); The Turner House by Angela Flournoy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); and The Unfortunates by Sophie McManus(Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Each of the short-listed authors received a $1,000 award.