Tash Aw (born 1971) is a Malay author living in London. His parents are Malays, the writer himself was born in Taiwan, but when he was two years old the family moved to Kuala Lumpur. He grew up in a multilingual environment and studied law at Cambridge and later at the University of Warwick. He also earned a degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia.
His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize. So far, it has been translated into twenty languages and compared to the works of such artists as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Albert Camus. In 2009, Map of the Invisible World was published – a story of two brothers separated into families in Indonesia and Malaysia. In 2013, with the novel Five Star Billionaire, he was again nominated for the Booker Prize. In Polish, the book was published as Pięć okien z widokiem na Szanghaj.
Tash Aw is one of the most popular Malay contemporary writers, earning him celebrity status in Malaysia and Singapore.