Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng finds it ‘much harder’ to write about real people

'Winning would mean much, much more than something personal for me: no writer from Malaysia – no writer from South-East Asia, and, in fact, no writer from Asia – has ever won the Booker Prize,' says Tan in his Booker Prize website interview that accompanies his longlisted book 'The House Of Doors'. Photo: The Star/Low Lay Phon

Authors – they’re just like us.

Malaysian writer Tan Twan Eng, 51, whose latest novel The House of Doors has been longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, confides that he, like many of us, has had to fake it to make it.