Tash Aw Reimagines Epic Storytelling with Southeast Asian Quartet
Celebrated writer Tash Aw speaks openly about his literary journey. He shares insights from the Jaipur Literature Festival where he presented his latest work. Aw belongs to an exclusive group of authors with three Booker Prize nominations. His novels earned longlist spots in 2005, 2013, and 2025. This timeline captures significant changes in how English readers engage with Asian literature.
Skepticism Towards Literary Prizes and Institutions
Aw expresses strong reservations about the prize system. He calls awards "totally random" and compares them to winning a lottery. Having served as a judge for major literary prizes, he states they offer little artistic help. This cautious attitude toward validation permeates his fiction. His work consistently charts the social and emotional landscapes of Southeast Asia across generations.
The South: A Fresh Take on the Epic Form
His new novel, The South, launches an ambitious quartet. The series spans a century of transformation in the region. Many describe the book as a coming-of-age story. Aw, however, views it as something broader and more complex. It explores themes of land, inheritance, and the Asian financial crisis. The narrative focuses on families connected by blood, uncertainty, and historical disruptions.
Aw deliberately rethinks the epic tradition. He never intended to write a single, massive epic. "I was not willing to give ten years of my life, twenty years of my life, to writing one book," he explains. Instead, he chose a quartet format for greater fluidity. This approach allows for a looser, more adaptable epic structure.
Ancient Inspiration from the Ramayana
The British-Malaysian writer cites the Ramayana as a key influence. When asked about South Asian epics, he immediately references this ancient text. "It is something I know quite well," Aw says. He acknowledges its impact on how he conceives stories involving multiple characters over extended periods.
He values variation over sheer scale. Epic tales, he notes, lack consistency. They shift in form, style, and pace. They carry different tones. This instability mirrors real human experience. "We live really in the moment, and then that moment is gone," Aw observes. History and memory arrive in fragments. Modern life makes us experience time in a disjointed manner. We constantly try to catch up with it.
Centering Marginalized Voices in Literature
Aw previously labeled the epic a "hyper-masculine" genre. He argues that traditional literary subjects are dominated by Western males who achieve so-called great things. His writing intentionally highlights characters usually relegated to the background. These exclusions feel personal to him.
"It is not so much queer people, not so much women, not so much lower middle-class or working-class people. But those are the people I grew up with," he shares. As a queer child raised primarily by women, queerness was never a marginal experience. "If you have grown up in the body, in the skin of someone who’s queer, you don’t think of yourself as being on the margins," Aw states. That perspective shapes his entire world. Naturally, his epic focuses on these very people.
The Symbolism of a Rotten Orchard
In The South, these concepts materialize through land imagery. A fruit orchard in the novel references Edenic myths of fertility and inheritance. Aw subverts these myths immediately. "The moment that idea came, it was already ruined," he reveals. The orchard is rotting and barren, no longer productive.
This metaphor is intentional. Aw aims to challenge notions of natural land fertility. We often assume a natural order for people, genders, and nations. He disagrees strongly. "Nothing exists naturally," Aw asserts. "There is nothing that is natural. Even love. Even motherhood. They have to be worked at." Relationships, like countries, require constant effort and nourishment.
Critiquing Western Political Narratives
Discussing contemporary politics, Aw voices concern about growing conservatism in the West. He notes that many agitators for conservative values once considered themselves progressive. The West, long seen as progressive, now appears retrograde to him. It suffers from a failure of imagination.
In contrast, Asia experiences real, though uneven, change. He cites India's decriminalization of homosexuality and Thailand's legalization of same-sex marriage. Aw speaks bluntly about Western immigration policies. "If the West doesn’t sort out its relationship with immigration very quickly, it’s going to implode," he warns. Western economies and demographics depend heavily on migration.
He focuses more on intra-Asian immigration. Movement across borders, like from South Asia to Malaysia, already reshapes daily life.
Questioning Geopolitical Language and Framing
Aw approaches geopolitics with caution, reminding he is a novelist, not a geopolitician. He hesitates to use phrases like "Chinese aggression towards Taiwan." Such framing, he argues, is misleading and symptomatic. He calls it "factually untrue" and "a manifestation of American fantasies about China."
What disturbs him is the simplification of complex histories into moral soundbites. This language imports a pre-written narrative. It leaves no space for ambiguity, regional context, or historical nuance. "It’s something we all have to disengage from," Aw advises. He refers to the tendency to narrate global power struggles through a Western geopolitical lens.
