Tash Aw


Tash Aw, whose full name is Aw Ta-Shi, is a Malaysian writer living in London, England.

Biography

Born in 1971 in Taipei, Taiwan, to Malaysian parents, Tash Aw returned to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the age of two, and grew up there. Like many Malaysians, he had a multilingual upbringing, speaking Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese at home, and Malay and English at school. He eventually relocated to England to study law at Jesus College, Cambridge, and at the University of Warwick before moving to London to write. He completed the MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia in 2003.
His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, was published in 2005. It was longlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and won the 2005 Whitbread Book Awards First Novel Award as well as the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel. It also made it to the long-list of the world's prestigious 2007 International Impac Dublin Award and the Guardian First Book Prize. It has thus far been translated into twenty languages. He cites his literary influences as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Marguerite Duras, William Faulkner and Albert Camus.
His second novel, titled Map of the Invisible World, was published in May 2009. Time magazine called it "a complex, gripping drama of private relationships," and praised "Aw's matchless descriptive prose", "immense intelligence and empathy." His 2013 novel Five Star Billionaire was longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, he published The Face: Strangers on a Pier, a memoir on immigration through the experience of his Chinese-Malaysian family, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His novel, We, The Survivors, published in 2019, was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His novels have been translated into 23 languages.
In January 2018, his alma mater, the University of Warwick, awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. He has been a visiting professor at Columbia University and was the 2018/19 Judith Ginsberg Fellow at the Institute of Ideas & Imagination in Paris. He is also a of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
In 2023, Aw was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Aw's fifth novel, The South, was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Works

Novels

  • The Harmony Silk Factory
  • Map of the Invisible World
  • Five Star Billionaire
  • We, The Survivors
  • ''The South''

    Short stories

  • "Notes from a Desert Sketchbook", Off the Edge, Issue 07 - Off the Edge was a Malaysian English-language magazine, now defunct
  • "", Prospect, Issue 122
  • "To The City", Granta, 100
  • "Sail", A Public Space, Issue 13 - won the 2013 O. Henry Prize; republished in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, Laura Furman
  • "Tian Huaiyi", McSweeney's 42
  • "Tiger"

    Nonfiction

  • ''The Face: Strangers On A Pier''

    Essays

  • "" New York Review of Books May 13 2023
  • "" Granta 21 November 2019
  • "" New York Review of Books May 11 2023
  • "" London Review of Books, 16 February 2017
  • "", The Weeklings, 4 April 2014
  • "", NewYorker.com, 11 February 2016
  • " ", The Fabulist, Issue 16
  • "", Burgess at 100, Episode 2
  • "", Literary Hub, 10 September 2019
  • , nytimes.com, 2014-

    As editor

  • ''X-24: Unclassified''