Novelist
Tan Twan Eng is one of the most successful Malaysian novelists whose historical fictions have garnered international recognition and praise from the literati. His second novel The Garden of Evening Mists made him the first non-British writer to win the Walter Scott Prize, earned him the Man Asian Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
A law graduate, Tan worked as an intellectual-property lawyer before taking a couple of years off to obtain his master’s degree in law in Cape Town, South Africa. A voracious reader ever since he was a child, which inspired a desire to eventually write a book, Tan found that there was no time better suited to writing his novel than while he was studying.
In 2007, his debut novel The Gift of Rain, which tells the story of a young man in Penang during the Japanese occupation, was published and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His love of history and his home country would inspire his second novel too, which also focused on Malaysia’s occupation by the Japanese during World War II. In 2020, The Garden of Evening Mists was adapted into a film. Both his novels have also been translated into several languages including Italian, Spanish, French and Russian.
A respected literary figure who can now consider his own heroes his peers, Tan is regularly invited to speak at literary festivals around the world. He is currently working on his third novel.
Awards
2013
Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
2012
Man Booker Prize (shortlisted)
2012
Man Asian Literary Prize
Did You Know?
Tan is big on reading and in his childhood often carried a book with him wherever he went—even to a family meal at restaurants, so he could read while waiting for the food to be served.