Miguel Syjuco

Miguel Syjuco is a Filipino writer. His debut novel, Ilustrado, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and won both the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Grand Prize at the Palanca Awards, his country’s top literary honour. Its acclaimed companion novel, I Was the President’s Mistress!!, was published in 2022 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Syjuco has also written widely for some of the world’s most respected publications. His work as a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times examined the decay of Philippine democracy, the bloody drug war of Rodrigo Duterte, and the return to power by the family of the disgraced late dictator, Ferdinand Marcos.

Currently, he is a professor at New York University Abu Dhabi and serves on the advisory council of the Resilience Fund, a project by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime to empower global communities most threatened by criminality. He works in Arabia and lives in Mediterranean Europe; he still calls Manila home.