Miguel Syjuco

Miguel Syjuco (b. November 17, 1976) is a Filipino writer from Manila and the grand prize winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize for his first novel Ilustrado.

Born Miguel Augusto Gabriel J. Syjuco, he is the son of Representative Augusto Syjuco Jr. of the second district of Iloilo in the Philippine House of Representatives, and Judy Jalbuena.

Syjuco graduated from high school in 1993 from the Cebu International School. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2000 and completed his MFA from Columbia University in 2004. In early 2011 he completed a PhD in literature from the University of Adelaide.

Early in his career, he was a fellow of the 1998 Silliman National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete, Negros Oriental.

His novel, Ilustrado, won the Grand Prize for the Novel in English at the 2008 Palanca Awards. In November of the same year, he won the Man Asian Literary Prize also for Ilustrado.

In 2010, the novel won the QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, Quebec's top literary prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 as well as a Globe and Mail Top 100 of 2010. The novel was also a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, and a finalist for the 2010 Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal. In late 2010, Ilustrado was published in translation in Spanish (Tusquets), Swedish (Natur och Kultur), and Dutch (Mouria).

In 2011, Ilustrado joined books by David Mitchell, Aleksandar Hemon, Marie NBiaye, and Wells Tower for the Premio von Rezzori. It was also among the three top finalists for the $55,000 Prix Jan Michalski, an annual Swiss prize for the best international book, as well as the Prix Courrier International, which honors the best international books translated in France.

In 2011, it was published in translation in Serbian (Geopoetika), French (Editions Christian Bourgois), Catalan (Tusquets), Italian (Fazi), Japanese (Hakusuisha), Czech (Jota), German (Klett-Cotta), and Brazilian Portuguese (Compahnia das Letras).

Syjuco is represented by Peter Straus at the Rogers, Coleridge and White Literary Agency in London, and by Melanie Jackson in New York City. He has already sold a second book to North American publishers.

In 2013, he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. In 2014, he served as the International Writer-in-Residence at NTU, in Singapore.

He is currently a visiting professor in the Literature and Creative Writing department at New York University Abu Dhabi.

Since 2004 Syjuco has been based primarily in Montreal, Quebec.