AAPI Heritage Month | South East Asian Recommendations

For those who haven’t yet heard or managed to miss any of my previous posts on the topic, May is Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month! As part of my ongoing posts throughout the month, I will be recommending some books for AAPI Heritage Month. The first recommendation list focused on Pasifika authors, and this week is focused on South East Asian authors.

This list was particularly difficult to compose. Whilst some countries, such as Vietnam and Malaysia had a lot of authors to choose from, other countries like Laos and East Timor didn’t have many books which have been translated into English and/or aren’t written by Westerners. I have made every effort possible to include at least 1 book for each country and ensure that they are all #ownvoice authors as much as I can. Please do let me know if there are any errors or if you have any recommendations.

What is Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month?

At the beginning of the month, I spoke about May being Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPIHM) and there were some people who didn’t know what it was – that’s okay! A year ago when I first started book blogging I had never heard of AAPIHM either. It’s thanks to a really great awareness raising post by Pasifika blogger Anjulie Te Pohe in her post about the erasure of Pacific Islander books during AAPIHM that I started learning more about this erasure and AAPIHM more generally.

To kick off my AAPI Heritage Month themed posts I wanted to start off with a basic question – What is Asian American & Pacific Island Heritage Month?