Miguel Syjuco – a Filipino novelist, journalist, civil society advocate, and professor at New York University Abu Dhabi – is a contributing opinion writer for the International New York Times and serves on the Advisory Council of the Resilience Fund, a project by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime to support communities threatened by criminal abuse of power. His debut novel Ilustrado was a NY Times Notable Book as well as the winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, the Hugh MacLennan Prize, the Palanca Award, and the Filipino Readers' Choice Award.
Dr Syjuco has worked in journalism for 20 years as a copyeditor and a freelancer. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Time, Newsweek, the Nikkei Asian Review, the Globe & Mail, the International Herald Tribune, Rappler, the Boston Review, OpenDemocracy, and on the BBC, CBC, Inside Higher Ed, and many others.
Born in Manila in 1976, Dr Syjuco received a BA in English Literature from the Ateneo de Manila University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide. He was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and is a member of the Academy of the Rathbones Folio Prize.
His fiction and non-fiction focus on politics, history, inequality, cultural identity, literature, and formal experimentation.