Uncharted Ambition: Retelling the Story of Modern Migration

Lecture by Tash Aw, author, and Judith Ginsberg Fellow with the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination

Author Tash Aw will discuss his research specifically on Chinese migration to Africa, which is the backdrop of his novel-in-progress. He will be sharing his thoughts on how the official narrative of migration—as discussed in the newspapers, even in novels—fails to capture the reality of large-scale human movement across borders. He will engage with the Western-centric view of thinking about migration, and the application of theory at the expense of the vastly differing personal stories that make up the grand narrative of contemporary migration."

This lecture is part of the "Wednesdays at the Institute" lecture series organized by the Institute for Ideas & Imagination.

Tash Aw – Judith Ginsberg Fellow / Malaysia

Tash Aw is the author of the novels Five Star Billionaire (long listed for the 2013 Man Booker Prize), Map of the Invisible World, and The Harmony Silk Factory (long listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize) and, most recently, The Face: Strangers on a Pier, a memoir of a Malaysian family (finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize). His work has been translated into twenty-three languages. His essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, the Magazine Littéraire, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times. He has received, among other distinctions, a Whitbread First Novel Award (2006), a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Asia-Pacific Region (2006), and the O. Henry Prize (2013).