Mia Alvar

Mia Alvar is a Filipino writer based in New York. Her critically regarded debut work, In the Country, features nine stories about exiled Filipino workers living in the Middle East and the United States who lead "morally messy" and "unpredictable" lives full of "contradictions and weaknesses". These characters are part of the Philippine diaspora: workers dispersed around the globe for economic reasons to work as maids and nurses and in other jobs. Alvar offers "deft portraits of transnational wanderers" who are "blessed and cursed with mobility," according to New York Times critic J. K. Ramakrishnan, with a major theme in her work being the cultural conflicts of immigrants. Critic Maureen Corrigan on NPR described Alvar's writing style as gorgeous. Ramakrishnan compared her characters to ones written by Nadine Gordimer. Chicago Tribune critic Amy Gentry described Alvar's prose as "precise and patient" with a gift for "grounded human-scale metaphors". Christian Science Monitor critic Steve Donoghue described Alvar's talent as the "smart depiction of lives lived between two worlds" offering "vivid glimpses of street life in Manila." In the Country won numerous awards, including the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers list, and was listed as a New York Times "Editors' Choice" book. Alvar was born in the Philippines, raised in Bahrain, and studied at Harvard and Columbia. She returned to her home country in 1999 after ten years in the United States and found Manila alien yet fascinatin