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Tan Twan Eng is a Malaysian author born in Penang in 1972. His first novel The Gift of Rain was published in 2007 and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize that year; it is set in Penang in the years before and during the Japanese occupation of Malaya in World War II and has received critical acclaim around the world. It is also a bookclub favourite.

He worked as an intellectual property lawyer before going full time into writing. He is working on his second book. He has a first-dan ranking in aikido.

In the last year he has spoken and appeared at various literary festivals, including the Singapore Writers' Festival, the Ubud Writers' Festival in Bali, The Asia Man Booker Festival in Hong Kong, the Shanghai Literary Festival, the Perth International Writers' Festival, and also at the Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne, Australia. in May 2009 he was a guest at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in South Africa, where he appeared together with Justin Cartwright and Vikas Swarup.

He ranks Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro as two of the best writers writing today.

The Gift of Rain has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Greek, Romanian, Czech, Serbian and French.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tan Twan Eng", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0