Sri Lankan Writing
The Sri Lankan literary scene in awakening to a new dawn, says Romesh Gunesekera
When I started out, Sri Lankan fiction – whether in English, Tamil or Sinhala – was hard to find. There were gems, but in London you had to dig deep into a specialist library shelf to spot them. Although in Sri Lanka the written word goes back millennia, its fiction did not seem to matter much to anyone anywhere.
I was told, at the time, that slim books of fiction were rare in England. The outlook was not promising. My first novel, Monkfish Moon, came out in 1992 and made a bit of a splash. Things began to change.
Two years later, with Reef on the Booker shortlist, the map of the fictional world shifted a little, at least for me. I visited Colombo and found a real buzz about books. People flocked to book events. Despite an escalating war and political turbulence, the appetite for writing was palpable. By the time The Sandglass was published, new bookshops blossomed and a Sri Lankan writing prize was established. Soon, new publishers were on the scene in Colombo amid a growing number of readers and writers wanting to imagine the reality around them, understand the catastrophes of recent decades, and go beyond.
For me, Sri Lanka at its best has been a place of plurality, although in recent years that has often been under serious threat. Since Sinbad stumbled into it, the island draws in writers and storytellers from all over the world. Over the last 20 years, Sri Lankan-born writers have been writing all over the world and within Sri Lanka itself, transforming our ideas of place and identity.
Now I hear a new eclectic generation of Sri Lankans, born in and outside the country. Soon, I hope, their books and the ones before will be hard to miss on any shelf.
Romesh Gunesekera’s latest novel The Prisoner of Paradise, will be published by Bloomsbury in February 2012.
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