It takes six e-mails to negotiate a meeting place with Montreal author Miguel Syjuco. He insists he’s happy to meet anywhere, but won’t allow me to inconvenience myself with a meeting place even halfway between our neighborhoods. We finally settle on a bistro a couple of blocks from my home. When he arrives, a little late from a struggle with parallel parking, he apologizes repeatedly and is far more grateful than he needs to be for my interest in his debut novel, Ilustrado.

In 2008, when the unpublished manuscript of Ilustrado (which was written in English) won both the Palanca Award – the most prestigious literary award of Syjuco’s birthplace, the Philippines – and the internationally recognized Man Asian Literary Prize, the then 31-year-old author was described by The Manila Times as “excruciatingly gentle and agonizingly affable.” It’s an exaggeration, to be sure, but there’s no doubt about it – he’s an extremely polite, nice guy.

Syjuco completed the first draft of Ilustrado – about the fictitious “panther of Philippine letters” Crispin Salvador – while working as a copy editor at Montreal’s The Gazette, and he says he submitted it to the Palanca and Man Asian juries almost as an afterthought. The Palanca win didn’t result in much international attention – the Philippines isn’t exactly a breeding ground for novelists, and Ilustrado was one of only 15 novels submitted that year – but the Man Asian win resulted in a flood of offers. He and his American agent, Melanie Jackson, settled on a pre-emptive bid by Farrar, Straus and Giroux editor-in-chief Eric Chinski, and the Canadian rights were subsequently sold to Penguin Canada imprint Hamish Hamilton. Ilustrado has since been translated into more than a dozen languages and is set for worldwide release this month.

It’s an impressive accomplishment, especially for someone groomed for a career in politics, not literature. Syjuco’s mother, Judy Syjuco, currently holds a congressional seat in the Philippine province of Iloilo, a seat previously held by Syjuco’s father, Augusto. “That’s the way it is in the Philippines,” says Syjuco, a little sheepishly, about what might seem to Canadians like a dynasty. It’s also the Philippine way, he says, to follow in your parents’ footsteps. “But I knew with my quixotic idealism, I would either be an absolute failure [in politics], or I’d be shot, or I would become corrupted. I just decided, ‘Sorry dad, I know this is going to piss you off like anything, but I’m going off to try and be a writer.’ And I’ve pursued that relentlessly ever since.”

After finishing a degree in English Literature at Ateneo de Manila University, Syjuco moved to New York City in 2001 and completed his MFA in creative writing at Columbia in 2004. While living in New York, he worked as a fiction reader at both The New Yorker and The Paris Review, experiences he describes as discouraging. “I’m a guy who’s never been published and I’m rejecting everybody else,” he says. “After I started submitting to journals [myself], I kept thinking of someone like me sitting there – some pimply faced guy with a bad attitude who hates everyone else’s work – rejecting me.”

It was at The Paris Review that Syjuco came up with the idea for Ilustrado. He was working as a fact-checker for the magazine’s Writers at Work series, which consisted of interviews with famous authors, and he would spend hours at the library every day sifting through stacks of biographies, memoirs, news clippings, etc. “It occurred to me,” he says, “that this would be a really interesting way to create a portrait of an artist.”

Ilustrado opens with the discovery of Crispin Salvador’s body floating in the Hudson River. The mystery of his death, and the story of his life, is revealed by the novel’s narrator, Miguel, via excerpts from Salvador’s work – his novels, his autobiography, and iconoclastic essays like “If God Exists, Why Does He Make Us Fart?”– and via Miguel’s own blogs and e-mails. Syjuco worked with FSG’s Chinski for almost a year re-writing the manuscript. “The characters got deeper, the loose ends were all tied up, and it felt much, much tighter – to the point where I’m actually happy with it,” he says.

Syjuco’s editor at Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Canada publisher Nicole Winstanley, has high expectations for the book’s success here. “We’re absolutely submitting it to all the Canadian prizes, and we’re expecting it to appear on those lists,” she says. Though the book isn’t set in Canada, it’s a thoughtful but quite biting satire of a country that has always been a little insecure about its own literary traditions, which could well appeal to Canadian readers and critics.

Syjuco, who moonlights as an occasional book reviewer for CBC Radio, is a voracious reader of Canadian and American literature (“I cried when John Updike died”), and he cites Chilean author Roberto Bolaño as a major influence. But comparisons will probably be made to Dominican-American author Junot Diaz, who also pulled off the difficult balancing act of blending history and pop-culture in the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Syjuco says he hasn’t read Diaz’s book yet, though it is on his “to read” stack. Perhaps a better comparison might be to Canadian author Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, a faux anthology of post-colonial literature from the invented country of Sanjania. Syjuco loved Marche’s book, and says he’d be happy for Ilustrado to stand in its company. “It’s so good. You forget that it’s all written by one person,” he says.

It’s obvious Syjuco feels a strong connection to his adopted country. Though he has been living in Montreal since 2007, he spent 10 years in Vancouver as a child after his parents temporarily abandoned the Philippines to escape the repressive Marcos regime. His more recent move from New York to Montreal was due to his Australian girlfriend, who was doing an exchange year at McGill University. The couple fell in love with the city and now hope to stay here indefinitely.

With Ilustrado completed, Syjuco is currently finishing up a long-distance Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Adelaide in Australia, and he is in the final stages of completing his second novel (which has already been bought by Hamish Hamilton) about a notorious political mistress. Ultimately, Syjuco says, he wants all of his work to be politically engaged in some way. “I hope you write that and hold me to it,” he says as our interview ends. “Because if [Ilustrado] does well, I want to be reminded that I still need to do something with my writing.  I’m writing because I want to make a difference.”