The Harmony Silk Factory

Tash Aw (born 4 October 1971 in Taipei, Taiwan, to Malaysian parents of Chinese descent) grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, after his family returned when he was two. He studied law at Cambridge and Warwick universities before earning an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, launching a career as a novelist with his debut The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Notable works include Map of the Invisible World (2009), Five Star Billionaire (2013), We, the Survivors (2019), and The South (2025); his novels have been longlisted for the Booker Prize multiple times, translated into 23 languages, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.