BooksThe Vancouver author spoke with CBC Books about the inspiration behind his novel The Tiger and the Cosmonaut. The book is one of the five shortlisted titles for the 2025 Giller Prize.The Vancouver author talked about the authenticity behind the storyLuke Beirne · CBC Books · Posted: Nov 07, 2025 11:41 AM EST | Last Updated: 3 hours agoListen to this articleEstimated 5 minutesThe audio version of this article is generated by text-to-speech, a technology based on artificial intelligence.Eddy Boudel Tan is an author based in British Columbia. (Hannes van der Merwe)When Eddy Boudel Tan first pitched his novel The Tiger and the Cosmonaut, his editor looked at him and said, “So, tell me, what is this book about?” “This is a book about Asian rage,” Boudel Tan told his editor. “I had never really articulated or described my book quite in that way before, but if my goal was to catch [my editor’s] attention it worked. He was intrigued and he asked me to elaborate.”Boudel Tan did, explaining how the book was a depiction of the experience of being a second-generation immigrant in Canada, which he described as “feeling somewhat caught between cultures.” The Tiger and the Cosmonaut features a Chinese Canadian protagonist named Casper Han who is forced to travel back to the fictional B.C.-based remote town of Wilhem to uncover the mystery of his father’s recent disappearance. Boudel Tan’s parents are from Brunei; he was born in Canada, and grew up as a Canadian citizen, but was consistently asked, “Where are you from?” by people around him. Because of that, he described his experience growing up in Canada as “the feeling of being othered in a place that is home.”The Tiger and the Cosmonaut is Boudel Tan’s third book and is on the shortlist for the 2025 Giller Prize. The other four shortlisted titles for the $100,00 prize include We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad, The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight, and Pick A Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa. A personal connectionBoudel Tan described The Tiger and the Cosmonaut as, “the hardest book that I’ve ever written, and I say that because it was the most personal.”Unlike his first two novels, which had more distance from his lived experience, The Tiger and the Cosmonaut is draws upon Boudel Tan’s lived experience and identity.He says that he wrote the book to honour families like his who have migrated to Canada, “who are raising children who they want to integrate and prosper in this land while also honouring their heritage.”While writing the book, he had a hunger to find out more about his own parents and family history. “This was during the dark days of the pandemic,” he said. “I began to realize that my parents were aging and that they weren’t going to be around forever.”Boudel Tan’s outdoor writing space at his Vancouver condo. (Eddy Boudel Tan)Because of this, he started to ask his parents questions about their own lives and experiences.“All of this was also amid a backdrop of rising hate against Asians,” said Boudel Tan. “During this time, there was a sharp increase in vandalism on Asian cultural buildings and institutions, vocal and physical assaults against Asian Canadians and Asian Americans.”The stories he heard from his parents weren’t all about difficulties but included “many joyful and exciting stories.” Moving to Canada “was an adventure for them. They told me about what it was like to go shopping for winter coats for the first time in their lives and how exciting that was.”He also said that he tried something new with his writing process. “I used to plot my books meticulously because all of my work has different storylines and threads that at some point come together and it can get quite complicated.” In fact, he said he would “go so far as to plot [his] books with an Excel spreadsheet.” “Every scene would be in a cell and that’s how I plotted my book to make sure that it all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.” But, with this book, “I let the story pull me more and took it one chapter at a time,” he said. Though he always knew the basic idea of the story, he allowed the novel to unfold as “organically” as he could. This turned out well because the novel took on mystery and suspense elements that Boudel Tan said made it a lot more interesting. “Instead of writing a story that was explicitly about race and class, I wrote a story about race and class that was disguised as a mystery and I think that served the story really well.”He talked about the way that this was influenced by his own reading taste.”One of my compulsions seems to be to obscure certain things for the reader,” he said. “I don’t intend to do this, at least consciously, but when I read books, I love being taken for a ride. I love surprises, I love revelations. Like, I love it when a story reveals itself gradually and, as the pieces come together, forms a clear picture of the truth.”Boudel Tan said this is reflective of real life “especially in this age when there’s so much distortion of the truth, so much misinformation and disinformation. The truth is not always so evident, so I think that there’s something that rings very true about how distorted truth can be.”ABOUT THE AUTHORLuke Beirne is a researcher at CBC News in Saint John. He is also a writer and the author of three novels. You can reach him at luke.beirne@cbc.ca.
The hardest book I have ever written: B.C.’s Eddy Boudel Tan reflects on his Giller Prize-shortlisted novel
