From Wikimedia Commons by S L O W K I N G
Viet Thanh Nguyen announced on Twitter that his Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel, The Sympathizer, is slated for a TV series adaptation by production companies A24 (Minari, The Farewell, Euphoria) and Rhombus Media (Possessor, Enemy).
In his announcement, Nguyen also revealed that Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden, Snowpiercer) would be joining the project as director.
Nguyen expressed his excitement to be working with Park, whose thriller Oldboy inspired The Sympathizer. He was particularly interested in what Park would be able to accomplish with the infamous squid scene.
The Sympathizer, published in 2015, follows a nameless half-French, half-Vietnamese communist spy as he struggles to reconcile his identity as a “man of two minds” through the Fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, his evacuation into exile in Los Angeles, and his service in Southeast Asia.
Besides the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Nguyen won various other awards for his debut including the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction, Deadline reports. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
This announcement comes a month after the publication of The Sympathizer’s sequel: The Committed, which traces the narrator’s new life as a refugee in Paris and his experimentation with capitalism.
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