TASH AW
Born in Taipei to Malaysian parents, Tash Aw grew up in Kuala Lumpur before moving to Britain to attend university. He is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), Map of the Invisible World (2009), Five Star Billionaire (2013) and The South (2025), which have won the Whitbread First Novel Award, a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and thrice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; they have also been translated into 23 languages.
A radiant novel of longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer – about family, desire and what we inherit. At once sweeping and intimate, The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide. It is the first in a quartet of novels that form Tash Aw’s masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great change – a reimagined epic for our time.
The Enterprise Centre, UEA | 6.30pm
‘Everything about this novel is heartstoppingly vivid: its physical and emotional and social landscapes are rendered in sumptuous, shocking detail, while its meditations on desire and family are ecstatic and devastating all at once. It’s exquisite.’
Oisín McKenna, author of Evenings and Weekends
‘Reflecting the human entanglements that come with home, land and homeland, The South is a shimmeringly intelligent and elegiacally intimate novel.’
Yiyun Li, author of Wednesday's Child