Tash Aw was born in 1971 to Malaysian parents in Taipei. When he was two years old, the family returned to their homeland, where Aw grew up in Kuala Lumpur. He studied law at Cambridge and Warwick, then worked as a lawyer in London and began writing. <\/p>\n\n
In 2002, Aw completed his degree in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia; his debut novel \u00bbThe Harmony Silk Factory\u00ab was published in 2005. Aw tells the story of Johnny Lim, a Chinese businessman in Malaysia who rises to prominence in the early 20th century as a charismatic but enigmatic entrepreneur and alleged traitor. <\/p>\n\n
The novel \u00bbMap of the Invisible World\u00ab (2009) tells the story of Adam, an Indonesian boy who searches for his missing adoptive father during the political turmoil of the 1960s in Indonesia, delving deep into his own past and that of his country. \u00bbWe, the Survivors\u00ab (2019) tells the story of Ah Hock, a Malaysian man of Chinese descent who, after his release from prison, looks back on a life of hard work and hardship that eventually led to a violent incident in which he killed a Bangladeshi migrant. With \u00bbStrangers on a Pier\u00ab (2019), Aw paints a portrait of his Malaysian-Chinese family. More than a hundred years ago, his two grandfathers traveled by water from southern China to Singapore and settled on the Malaysian mainland. In his memoir, he describes his parents’ fading memories of their roots and his own frustration with the \u00bbsentimentality of immigrant success stories with their inevitable promise of redemption\u00ab (Guardian). <\/p>\n\n
Aw was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2005 and his work has been translated into 23 languages. <\/p>\n\n
He lives in Paris and Kuala Lumpur and comments on culture and politics in Southeast Asia for the New York Times and BBC, among others. The author lives in Berlin in 2024 as a fellow of the DAAD’s Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13548,"template":"","jct-role":[1080],"jct-origin":[909,491],"jct-ilb-years":[601,613,906],"class_list":["post-41445","authors","type-authors","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","jct-role-author","jct-origin-taiwan-en","jct-origin-united-kingdom","jct-ilb-years-2007-en","jct-ilb-years-2019-en","jct-ilb-years-2024-en"],"yoast_head":"\n