Tom Sykes

Welcome to the personal website of writer, editor and University of Portsmouth Associate Professor Dr Tom Sykes. From satire to academic essays, reportage to travel narrative, here’s a stash of stuff I’ve published in media including Private Eye, New Statesman, Interventions, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, New Internationalist, Declassified UK, New African, The Philippine Free Press and many other outlets.

My new book, Coast of Teeth, is a travelogue of English seaside towns and a collaboration with the illustrator Louis Netter and is out now. It has been endorsed by Will Self and Arthur Smith. Buy it here.

Buy my last academic book, Imagining Manila: Literature, Empire and Orientalism, here.

‘Tom Sykes demonstrates how Manila functions as the metonym for the Philippine meta-archipelago, often with breath-taking reductiveness and strikingly telling material effects. Imagining Manila has much to teach us on the matter of representations, and why representations matter.” – Oscar V. Campomanes, Ateneo de Manila University

“Imagining Manila has the merit of shedding light on a myriad of texts from the Anglosphere, some of them relatively unknown … The variety of sources and references quoted is such that it makes very engaging reading. Intellectually stimulating, this will be of utmost interest for scholars researching travel literature in South East Asia and postcolonial studies.” – South East Asia Research journal

“Imagining Manila is a valuable resource for scholars interested in representations of Manila and perceptions about Filipinos in over a century. The sheer range and number of works Sykes discusses are impressive. Advanced students and scholars will also benefit from the concepts Sykes draws upon from postcolonial studies scholars.” – Philippine Studies journal

“Sykes provides a powerful antidote to the orientalist worlding of Manila in Anglo-American literature. Rigorous, engaged and insightful, his postcolonial critique of ‘Manilaism’ exposes the poverty and hypocrisy of this discursive paradigm and presents cogent analyses of anti-Manilaist writing, thereby offering a radically different imagining of Manila.” – Roderick G Galam, Oxford Brookes University, UK

Praise for my previous book, The Realm of the Punisher:

‘Tom Sykes’s account of his rambling road trip through the country, The Realm of the Punisher, offers a serious and at times tragic corrective. He conveys in an affectionate, unpatronizing tone the many layers of injustice that run through the Philippines, and uses interviews and site visits to try to explain the eccentric ways and popular appeal of its more muscular leaders.’

Times Literary Supplement (TLS)

‘At last! A Western journalist/academic writing about the Philippines who has done proper homework and legwork, and who clearly has an affection for both the country and its people.’

James Hamilton-Paterson, author of Ghosts of Manila and America’s Boy.

‘Tom Sykes’ book is an excellent contribution when it comes to Duterte. It sheds valuable light on how such a popular leader could emerge from the thicket of Philippine politics and why he literally continues to get away with murder.’

Walden Bello, Professor of Sociology and Public Administration at the University of the Philippines and author of The Food Wars.

‘Tom has surely earned his stripes. He’s written an almost encylopaedic collection of facts and anecdotes about the Philippines which anyone can dip into, from historical times to the wartime era, from heroes to dictators, up until today, the period of Duterte. It is the first book, as far as I know, that details the current Philippines, warts and all, centering on Duterte’s impact on Filipinos.’

Gene Alcantara, Filipino Chronicles.

‘The Realm of the Punisher is an accessible and meticulously researched travelogue based on lucid, first-hand reporting, interviews with a profusion of notable people and close readings of textual sources dating back centuries.’

The London Magazine

‘Tom Sykes’s artful descriptive style evokes characters and locations … This book deals with historical, social and political issues that most “travelogues” don’t.’

Socialist Review