Going South: Tash Aw on Inheritance, Identity, and Escape
From The Shakespeare and Company Interview by Shakespeare and Company
March 23, 2026 · 56 min
About this episode
Tash Aw discusses his novel 'The South', exploring themes of inheritance, identity, and the complexities of family dynamics.
This week Adam Biles speaks with Tash Aw about The South , his novel of inheritance, identity, and quiet upheaval. Set on a decaying farm in southern Malaysia, the story follows a family confronting generational fracture, class tension, and the uneasy weight of belonging. Aw explores how landscape is felt through the body rather than described, and how memory—fragmentary and unreliable—shapes narrative voice. The conversation covers adolescence, queer awakening, and the tension between freedom and fear when removed from social scrutiny. Aw reflects on writing from hindsight, the interplay between personal experience and fiction, and the ways families both sustain and constrain individual identity. Buy The South : https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-south-7 * TASH AW is the author of five novels, including We, the Survivors , and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, The Face: Strangers on a Pier, both finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has also won a Whitbread Award, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and an O. Henry Prize, and has three times been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His fiction has been translated into twenty-three…
People in this episode
Host: Adam Biles
Guest: Tash Aw
Topics covered
- inheritance
- identity
- class tension
- memory
- family dynamics
- queer awakening
- narrative voice
Keywords
- Tash Aw
- The South
- inheritance
- identity
- family
- queer awakening
- narrative voice
- class tension
- memory
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Shakespeare and Company, Acast
Products: In The Beginning
Books & works: The South, We, the Survivors, The Face: Strangers on a Pier
Places: Malaysia
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