Ilustrado: The contemporary Philippine masterpiece
About this ebook
‘A masterpiece’ – Alberto Manguel, El País
‘Miguel Syjuco is his country’s most original and unflinching literary voice’ – Salman Rushdie
Murder mystery. Literary puzzle. Bildungsroman. A tightrope taut between fact and fiction. An accusation and act of contrition. A society satirized in a shattered mirror. Ilustrado is a modern classic that defies classification.
Bold, demanding, but famously rewarding to intrepid readers, the novel starts with the waterlogged corpse of the great Filipino writer Crispin Salvador — then sweeps backwards and forwards through eras, genres, and narrative threads: weaving together generations of a complex history dictated by the once and future vainglories of the Philippine ruling class.
Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature. This edition features a new introduction by Robert Butcher.
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About the author
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 late disgraced 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.
