Tash Aw
Tash Aw, award-winning author of five novels and translator, is Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor for the winter semester 2025/26. He lives in Kuala Lumpur and Paris. His works have been nominated twice for the Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Whitbread Book Award for debut novels, and the O. Henry Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was a Fellow of the DAAD Artist Program.
Tash Aw published five books between 2005 and 2025, including most recently “The South” (HarperCollins, 2025), which made it straight onto the longlist for THE BOOKER PRIZE, as well as a non-fiction book entitled Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family (Luchterhand, 2024). He has been awarded the Whitbread and Commonwealth prizes for best debut novel and has been longlisted twice for the MAN Booker Prize, among many other awards. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement, and his writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the seminal Granta 100 issue. His works have been translated into 25 languages. He was born in Taipei in 1971 to Malaysian parents and grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Seminar Fiction in a Time of Turbulence
at Freie Universität Berlin
As part of the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professorship, Tash Aw will teach a seminar. This course will explore the extent to which fictional worlds can help us understand the complex causes of socio-political anger. The seminar program covers a literary and literary-theoretical spectrum ranging from revolutionary China to rural France, examining how writers from different times and places, including Chinua Achebe, Albert Camus, Alice Walker, and Ayu Utami, have responded differently to social upheaval. The aim is to explore the literary space in which personal narratives and political intentions are intertwined.
On October 28, Tash Aw will give his inaugural lecture on “Authenticity and the Death of Literature” at 6 p.m. at the FU Seminar Center.
Dates for further public events will be announced soon.
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Inaugural Lecture
Books
