Miguel Syjuco is a novelist and journalist who turns a satirical, unsparing eye on the Philippines, its politics, its corruption, and its long entanglements of class, power, and diaspora. Born in Manila in 1976 into a prominent political family, his father a congressman from Iloilo, he grew up between the Philippines and a string of homes abroad, studied at the Ateneo de Manila and Columbia, earned a doctorate in Adelaide, and supported himself for years as a working journalist and copy editor, including stints in Montreal and Australia.

His debut novel, Ilustrado, made him an international name before it was in print. Written in 2008, the manuscript won the Man Asian Literary Prize that year, the first time a Filipino had taken the award, and the Grand Prize for the Novel at the Philippines' top literary honor, the Palanca Awards, while still unpublished, an almost unheard-of double for a first book.

Published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Ilustrado is a work of dense, playful metafiction. The body of an exiled Filipino writer is pulled from the Hudson River, and his young protege, a character named Miguel, returns to Manila to investigate the death and a vanished manuscript, a search that opens into a family saga spanning a hundred and fifty years of Philippine history. A New York Times Notable Book, it has since been translated into roughly sixteen languages, carrying a very Filipino story to readers who had never heard of Crispin Salvador.

His second novel, I Was the President's Mistress (2022), is an even more audacious satire. Built entirely from interview transcripts, a ghostwritten oral history, it follows Vita Nova, a singer and actress who topples a president with a leaked recording and then runs for office herself, skewering celebrity, demagoguery, and the populist spectacle of the Duterte years. The book reads like a country arguing with itself in two dozen voices.

Alongside the fiction he has been a contributing opinion writer for the International New York Times and reported on Philippine affairs for the Guardian, Time, and Newsweek, and he now teaches literature and creative writing at New York University Abu Dhabi. Across novels and journalism alike he holds to one conviction, that writing can and should be a political act. For a list of living Filipino authors, Syjuco is among the most internationally awarded.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.