Among the twenty-four members of the 2017 class of MacArthur Fellows—recipients of the so-called “Genius Grant”—are two recent HUP authors: Sunil Amrith, whose Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants we published in 2013, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of 2016’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.
Here’s the MacArthur Foundation’s clip on Amrith, who was recognized for “illustrating the role of centuries of transnational migration in the present-day social and cultural dynamics of South and Southeast Asia”:
And their spot on Nguyen, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, and honored by MacArthur for “challenging popular depictions of the Vietnam War and exploring the myriad ways that war lives on for those it has displaced”:
Crossing the Bay of Bengal and Nothing Ever Dies are emblematic of concerns that’ve become central to our publishing program—migration, displacement, transnationalism, environmental history, climate change, and cultural memory, to name but a few aspects of these capacious works—and we’re thrilled to see this continued recognition for their authors. Congratulations to Amrith, Nguyen, and the rest of the 2017 class.
