Tash
Aw

There are writers who tell you something new about the world, and there are writers who take the world you know and shift your perspective ever so slightly, so that everything you look at from that moment onwards is profoundly transformed. Tash Aw is that writer. When he published his first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, it was apparent that here was a writer who would take a given genre—in the case of this debut novel, historical fiction about a place most Western readers are unfamiliar with—and slyly subvert it. 

Set in 1940s Malaya, The Harmony Silk Factory is ostensibly about the Japanese invasion of Malaysia, but through the use of multiple—and conflicting—points of view, and an antihero whose character is drawn and then redrawn, it becomes a novel about shifting memories and the deep, subjective unknowability of others. The Harmony Silk Factory garnered huge critical acclaim and won Tash the 2005 Whitbread Book Award for First Novel. 

He followed this up with Map of the Invisible World, a novel about revolutions, a lost childhood, and the search for identity, and then Five Star Billionaire, a kinetic, multivoiced tour de force which earned him his second Booker nomination. Tash’s concern has remained the knotty issues of identity: how individual and collective selves are constructed, both by external historical forces and by intimate relationships within families.  

There is a radical anti-colonial rebellion that runs through all Tash’s novels, as he resists, time and again, the Western gaze. So, in Five Star Billionaire, the immigrants are Asian migrants to China, and in his fourth novel, We, The Survivors, he explores race and social inequality through the lens of working-class voices in Malaysia. 

Tash is a polymath with truly impressive range. In 2016 he published Strangers on a Pier, a memoir in which he refracts the themes of migration, citizenship, and intergenerational trauma through the eyes of his own Chinese-Malaysian family. The slim book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and heralded a raw, more personal tone. 

In 2022, Tash published the English translation of the celebrated French writer Édouard Louis’s fourth novel, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, which the New York Times said was translated with “unobtrusive flair.” This encapsulates Tash’s style over the course of his twenty years as a novelist. It is unobtrusive because he always lets the characters speak for themselves, resisting the urge to allow his own authorial voice to take over. There is almost never a superfluous metaphor or a flourish that isn’t demanded by the text and the subject matter. And his writing demonstrates flair because it takes tremendous discipline and stylistic attention to pull off the layered, complex, and at times deeply mysterious stories that lie just beneath the surface. 

Text: Tahmima Anam