Best of 2025: South & Southeast Asian Writing
3 min read
Team Kitaab shares the best of 2025: South & Southeast Asian Writing — Fiction.
The fiction of South and Southeast Asia in 2025 is marked by an acute attention to intimacy, family, desire, belief, labour, and everyday survival, set against wider histories of migration, faith, ecology, and social change. Across genres that range from literary realism and fantasy to crime fiction and the short story, these books foreground voices negotiating inherited structures while imagining new forms of belonging. Together, the titles on this list reflect a regionally expansive yet deeply grounded body of writing that resonated strongly with readers and critics throughout the year.
1. The South by Tash Aw
A quietly expansive novel about family, land, and generational change in Malaysia. Aw traces how historical shifts, economic, political, and emotional, surface in the most intimate relationships, crafting a reflective meditation on inheritance, memory, and loss.
2. Delicious Hunger by Hai Fan
A striking collection that explores desire, deprivation, and survival through sharp, often unsettling narratives. Hai Fan’s stories attend closely to the body and its hungers, limits, and contradictions, situating personal longing within broader social realities.
3. Stories from the Islands by Ubud Writers & Readers Festival
This bilingual short story anthology features ten emerging Indonesian writers selected through the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2025. Spanning the country’s vast archipelago, the stories reflect Indonesia’s cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity while engaging with contemporary social and political concerns. Together, they offer a vibrant portrait of modern Indonesia through youthful, regionally grounded voices.
4. The Secret Lives of OFWs by Jet Tagasa
Focusing on the lives of Overseas Filipino Workers, this collection explores migration, labour, intimacy, and separation. Tagasa’s stories illuminate the emotional costs of transnational work, revealing the quiet resilience and fractures within migrant lives.
5. A Fiery Flesh and Other Stories by Ismim Putera
This short story collection confronts masculinity, violence, desire, and social pressure with unflinching clarity. Putera’s writing is visceral and provocative, using the body as a site through which power, repression, and vulnerability are negotiated.
Special Mention– Fablemaker by Mandy Moe Pwint Tu
This poetry collection moves between myth, memory, and intimate observation, drawing on storytelling traditions to explore love, loss, and the quiet violences of everyday life. Mandy Moe Pwint Tu’s poems are spare yet resonant, attentive to the textures of language and feeling, and grounded in a transnational sensibility that resists easy categorisation. Fablemaker stands out in 2025 for its lyrical precision and its ability to reimagine inherited narratives with emotional clarity.
Taken together, these works demonstrate the vitality and range of South and Southeast Asian fiction in 2025. Whether through the intimacy of family narratives, the speculative reach of myth and fantasy, or the compressed intensity of short fiction, these books reveal how storytelling continues to respond to shifting social realities across the region. They invite readers not only to witness lives shaped by history and movement but also to reconsider what belonging, inheritance, and imagination can mean in a transnational literary landscape.
About Author
One knows so little of SE Asian writing, so it’s wonderful having such a list. Thanks.
Thank you so much!
This is the first team our editorial team has worked on such lists, and it is encouraging to see a comment like this.
You are doing a great job and I hope you’ll be continuing the series with books from East and Central Asia. Wishing you happiness and success in 2026.
Thank you for your kind words and wishes.
Kitaab’s editorial focus remains on South Asian and Southeast Asian literature, and this series is part of that ongoing commitment. We appreciate your engagement and hope you continue reading along.