Translation Awards & Grants
For translating Grace Tioso’s The Born Out of Wedlock Club
- 2025 PEN Presents x International Booker Prize
For translating Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington
- 2023 PEN Translation Prize
- 2023 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize
For translating Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s Happy Stories, Mostly
- 2025 A.L. Becker Southeast Asian Literature in Translation Prize – honorable mention
- 2023 NBCC Barrios Book in Translation Prize – shortlist
- 2023 National Translation Award (in prose) – longlist
- 2023 Cercador Prize – finalist
- 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses (UK)
- 2022 International Booker Prize – longlist
For translating Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s Sergius Seeks Bacchus
- 2021 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize – shortlist
- 2018 PEN Translates grant
- 2017 PEN Presents grant (East and Southeast Asia) – shortlist
Writing Awards & Grants
2022 Copyright Agency Create Grant – to write But Won’t I Miss Me
2019 Ned Kelly Award longlist – for the novel Under Your Wings (US and UK title: The Majesties)
Praise for Books
But Won’t I Miss Me
“Readers will hang on every detail, falling easily into Tsao’s novel and its complex, flawed but sympathetic characters and unable to shake the unsettling tone set by the title; they won’t be even close to ready for the twist when it drops. A master class in storytelling that will leave readers, if not reborn, forever changed by the experience.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“But Won’t I Miss Me is a combination of mystery, psychological portrait, and sustained philosophical provocation. Tsao, a PEN Prize-winning literary translator of Indonesian fiction in addition to being an author, holds all these registers in balance with singular skill. Tsao’s horror operates through implication; the novel’s most disturbing moments arise from its world’s absolute and cheerful systemic indifference to what women surrender. Comparable to Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch or Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, this novel is breathtaking in its world-building and devastating in its emotional precision. But Won’t I Miss Me is the body horror novel motherhood always deserved.”
— Shelf Awareness (starred review)
“This well-structured and deeply compelling novel is about so much more than postpartum struggles literalized into horror. It’s about Chinese immigration to Australia in terms of the emotional reasoning, legal processes, and communal experiences. It’s also about a marriage’s expectations and limits in the face of new parentage and depression. Readers know early on that something went wrong with Vivi’s rebirth. When the reason is revealed in part two, and a shift in perspective retells the plot from a different lens, readers are treated to a profound exploration of the limits and consequences of love.”
— Booklist (starred review)
The Majesties / Under Your Wings
“This is a bold and dramatic portrayal of characters on the cusp of an impossible choice between complicit self-preservation and total annihilation.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Tiffany Tsao’s Under Your Wings is a sharply realised page-turner with a brilliant twist, written with an effortless command of pace and suspense.”
—The Sydney Morning Herald
“The Majesties, although it rolls out easily, troubles deeply, haunting and even chilling its reader well beyond the final page.”
—New York Journal of Books
“I think the fact that I am so unsettled by the read as a whole makes The Majesties a resounding success. It’s shocking how enjoyable and delicious this dark, disturbing novel was, and that unease will sit with me for a long time to come.”
— NPR
“The Majesties is an urgent literary thriller that also affectingly, seamlessly acts as a social treatise exposing the moral and legal abuses of the ultra-elite. Raised in Singapore and Indonesia, Tsao evokes a convincing sense of place. Vivid geographic and cultural details notwithstanding, Tsao’s (The Oddfits) first non-fantasy novel proves to be an engrossing, eloquent story of fatal familial dysfunction.”
—Shelf Awareness
“One of the most gripping, original and enlightening novels of the day.”
—SA Weekend
The Oddfits
Listed in Superhero Novels: The Best of 2017
The More Known World
Mentioned on Syfy Wire: December SFF Books to Keep An Eye Out For
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