Tiffany Tsao

Tiffany Tsao is an American-born literary translator and writer based in Sydney, Australia. She has translated a number of Indonesian writers into English, including Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Budi Darma, and Dewi Lestari.

Biography Tsao was born in San Diego, California, United States in 1983. Her family are of Indonesian Chinese background and she lived in Singapore and Jakarta, Indonesia for extended periods during her youth.

Tsao obtained a BA in English literature from Wellesley College, a liberal arts college in Massachusetts, graduating in 2004; during that time she began to write her first novel The Oddfits. After leaving Berkeley she worked as an academic teaching English literature at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Sydney, and the University of Newcastle, Australia. The sequel was called The More Known World and came out the following year. Her most recent novel, But Won't I Miss Me, was published in 2026.

Tsao became more involved in literary translation after leaving academia. She got the opportunity to start translating Indonesian literary works to English when Indonesia was featured at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The two developed a close working relationship and friendship. Tsao's English translation of Pasaribu's novel Happy Stories, Mostly won the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize and was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize She corresponded closely with Darma during the translation process, which took place over the COVID-19 pandemic. Tragically, Darma passed away before the English translation was published as People from Bloomington by Penguin Classics in 2022. The translation was well received, and won a PEN Translation Award as well as a NSW Premier's Translation Prize.

In 2025, Tsao was one of the inaugural winners of the PEN Presents x International Booker Prize for a sample translation of The Born Out of Wedlock Club by Grace Tioso.

Selected works As author The Oddfits (AmazonCrossing, 2016) The More Known World (AmazonCrossing, 2017) The Majesties (Atria Books, 2020) But Won't I Miss Me (HarperVia, 2026)

As translator Paper Boats by Dee Lestari (Amazon Publishing, 2017) The Birdwoman's Palate by Laksmi Pamuntjak (AmazonCrossing, 2018) Sergius Seeks Bacchus by Norman Erikson Pasaribu (Tilted Axis/Giramondo Publishing, 2019) Kitchen Curse: Stories by Eka Kurniawan (co-translator, Verso, 2019) Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu (Tilted Axis, 2021) People from Bloomington by Budi Darma (Penguin Classics, 2022)