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About the Author

Longlisted for the 2016 Epigram Books Fiction Prize

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By the author of Playing Madame Mao, hailed by Time magazine as "one of the best novels ever written about Singapore".

Ismael, a transplanted Singaporean, lives on a bucolic suburban Brisbane street. His job is to decide whether asylum-seekers get to stay in the country, a dilemma that never fails to remind him of his own immigrant status. But then his life begins to take on the hue of a nightmare: his neighbour inexplicably commits suicide, his wife dies of cancer, his daughter abandons him for the United States, and his Siamese cat goes missing.

In Lau Siew Mei’s new novel, an enclosed Australian neighbourhood becomes a microcosm of a world increasingly hostile towards migrants.
Lau Siew Mei was born and raised in Singapore. She is the author of two Playing Madame Mao and The Dispeller of Worries, and a children’s illustrated middle grade book, Yin’s Magic Dragon.

Her short stories have been broadcast on the BBC World Service and ABC Radio National, and published in Australia, USA, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore and the UK. She has been shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and Best Emerging Queensland Author in the QLD Premier’s Literary Awards, commended in the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, awarded Australia Council and Arts Queensland literary grants, a Varuna Residential Writers’ Fellowship and an Asialink Literature Residency in Malaysia.

The Last Immigrant is her third novel.

Novels

The Last Immigrant