Writers in Conversation #4 with Siang Lu
The Institute for Australian and Asian Arts and Culture (IAC) at Western Sydney University (WSU) is thrilled to invite you to Writers in Conversation #4, featuring Siang Lu, the 2025 Miles Franklin Award winner for his groundbreaking, genre-blending novel Ghost Cities. This event is held in partnership with the WSU’s Writing and Society Research Centre.
Siang Lu, born in Malaysia and raised in Brisbane, completed the manuscript of Ghost Cities in 2015. It took nearly a decade and more than 200 rejections from publishers before the book was finally published in 2024. It then picked up the most prestigious literary award in Australia. The book was hailed by the Miles Franklin judges: “Shimmering with satire and wisdom, and with an absurdist bravura, Ghost Cities is a genuine landmark in Australian literature.” This dramatic turn of events could be straight out of Siang Lu’s own writing—surprising, superbly satirical, and wildly imaginative.
Ghost Cities has been praised for its sharp humour and incisive critique of art, capitalism, and cultural identity. Critic Declan Fry describes it as “a dazzling, formally inventive satire that exposes the absurdities of global capitalism and cultural exchange with wit and poignancy.” The novel weaves a dual narrative between mythical and modern China, drawing inspiration from the country’s vacant megacities and from John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
While Siang Lu was collecting rejection slips for Ghost Cities, he wrote and published his other brilliant book, The Whitewash (2022), a scathing, hilarious satire of Asian misrepresentation in the film industry and “an ambitious work that’s attempting a story you rarely find in Australian fiction" (Jackie Tang). The book blends oral history and mockumentary, masterfully blurring fiction and fact, and takes readers on a wild ride. Here is a quote from The Whitewash:
Our grandparents grew up with the Yellow Peril. Our parents grew up with yellow discomfort. Our generation grew up with yellow invisibility.
Siang Lu’s satirical exploration of the whitewashing of Asian representations on the big screen and beyond is razor-sharp. Audiences and producers are not interested in Asians as they are, but require “Asians” to match the “Asians” of their preconceptions, —acceptable, appealing, and “just right”. His offhand humour and cutting observation both surprise and strike straight at the core:
The real measure of success, the proof that Asians have been fully accepted in Western society, will be when they start naming natural disasters after us: Hurricane Shuang. (The Whitewash)
In these two books, Siang Lu proves himself a master of satire, sparing no one or nothing from his eagle-eyed observations and piercing wit. With acerbic humour and ruthless precision, he skewers the absurdities of life. Most refreshingly, he writes unapologetically—and effortlessly—from and for his bicultural perspective.
A conversation not to be missed.