Infos
Festival opening
Tash Aw, The South
Moderator Tobias Döring
Set in Malaysia in the late 1990s, Tash Aws The South tells an intimate story of young love, inheritance, family and the existential struggle to navigate a changing world. 16-year-old Jay travels south with his family to the property his late grandfather has left them, a once-flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought. Despite these dire conditions, Jay’s father sends him out to work the land. Over the course of these hot, stifling days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager. Out in the fields, and on the streets leading into town, the tension between the boys intensifies – whilst inside the house, the other family members begin to drift apart.
Conjuring the damp heat of summer, the intensity of physical desire, and a deep sense of longing, Tash Aw’s novel masterfully engages all the senses while delicately exposing the fractures running through both family and society. Its poignant prose reveals an acute awareness of the role that class and language play in shaping people’s lives, relationships and sense of belonging.
“A sublime novel from one of the most important writers of our present” – Édouard Louis
The South was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025.
Tash Aw was born in Taiwan in 1971 and grew up in Kuala Lumpur. He studied law and creative writing in the UK and has published several novels, as well as a memoir of his Chinese-Malaysian family. His work has won numerous awards, including the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes. He has been longlisted for the Booker Prize three times and his fiction has been translated into more than 20 languages.
As an essayist and critic, he has contributed to The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times, among many other publications. He has translated two books by Édouard Louis and has been shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize. He held the Samuel Fischer Gastprofessur for Literature at the Freie Universität in Berlin during the winter semester of 2025/26.
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