Pride Month 2021:

Tash Aw is the author of four critically-acclaimed novels, including, most recently, We, the Survivors,
as well as a memoir of a contemporary Chinese-Malaysian family, The Face: Strangers on a Pier. His writing has won numerous honors, including the Whitbread Prize, Commonwealth Prize and an O. Henry Award, as well as being twice long-listed for the MAN Booker Prize. His novels have been translated into twenty-three languages. A regular contributor to the New York Times, the Guardian and the London Review of Books, his work has also appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, le Magazine Littéraire, A Public Space and the landmark Granta 100, among many others. Aw was a fellow at Columbia’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination from 2018-2019.

Abdellah Taïa was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1973. He is the first Arab writer/filmmaker to publicly declare his homosexuality. He is the author of nine novels written in French, including Salvation Army (2006), An Arab Melancholia (2008), both translated into English by Semiotext(e), and Infidels (2012) published by Seven Stories Press. His novel Le jour du Roi was awarded the prestigious French Prix de Flore in 2010. Salvation Army, his first movie as a director, is adapted from his eponymous novel. The film was selected for the Venice Film Festival 2013, TIFF 2013, New Directors 2014 and won many international prizes. A country for dying, translated into English by Seven Stories Press, was published in the USA in 2020 and won the Pen America Translation.

Photo credits:

Abdellah Taïa: Abderrahim Annag

Tash Aw: Stacy Liu