Post-war literature in Sri Lanka

 

 The Routledge Companion to Sinhala Fiction From Post-War SriLanka

Edited By Madhubhashini Disanayaka Ratnayake

2024, Routledge India This companion presents a critical collection of Sinhala resistance literature from Sri Lanka. It includes translated short stories and excerpts from Sinhala novels, written after the civil war in the country. Featuring national award-winning writers, the selected texts share a common theme of resistance as the writers write against an exclusivist nationalism that was propagated through mass media and platforms of party politics in Sri Lanka during the war.

The volume addresses crucial issues such as the fate of civilians in war, the role of religion in Sri Lankan polity, media censorship, the experience of women in war, as well as the current education system and youth problems in present day Sri Lanka. It highlights an alternate discourse that runs among the ethnic Sinhala group and contributes to the overall movement towards peace and reconciliation among the different ethnic communities in Sri Lanka.

A unique addition to the growing oeuvre of translated Sinhala literature, the companion will be indispensable to students, scholars, and researchers of ethnic studies, war and peace studies, peace and conflict studies, literature, cultural studies, political sociology, and South Asian studies, particularly those interested in Sri Lankan literature.

Uprooting the Pumpkin

Selections from Sri Lankan Tamil Literature, 1950-2012

Edited by Chelva Kanaganayakam

2016, Oxford University Press

 

The socio-political transformation of Sri Lanka that began in the 1970s, and continued for several decades thereafter, has been a major factor in shaping a literature that brought new and innovative forms of expression. This anthology brings together around forty poems, fifteen short stories, and one play in translation by eminent Sri Lankan literateurs, scholars, and translators dealing with Sri Lankan life at home and abroad spanning a period of sixty years. Voicing the agony, anxiety, and hardship of migration from different perspectives, this broadly representative collection is an important contribution to the study of exile literature.

 

Many Roads Through Paradise: An Anthology of Sri Lankan Literature

Edited by Shyam Selvadurai

2014, Penguin India

Shyam Selvadurai pieces together the best of Sri Lankan poetry and fiction in this anthology. From the Sinhala and Tamil writers of the 1950s to diasporic writers of today, from stories of love and longing to those of brutality and death, this masterfully constructed anthology will give you a rich sense Sri Lanka’s history, its people and the stories they have to tell.

From Martin Wickramasinghe’s Gamperaliya (1944), the first modern Sinhala novel, to the poetry of Puthuvai Ratnathurai, the official bard of the LTTE, who was among the thousands who disappeared after the end of the civil war in 2009, this anthology on Sri Lankan literature draws a long arc.

 

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Sri Lankan writers in English

https://www.thehindu.com/books/sri-lanka-new-literary-voices-writers-debut-books-novels-war-society-politics/article68535824.ece

The island nation’s young crop of writers is winning international awards and starting conversations on their post-war society and its unique challenges

Updated – September 17, 2024 11:26 am IST

 
(From right) Authors Shehan Karunatilaka, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Shankari Chandran, and Thushanthi Ponweera.

(From right) Authors Shehan Karunatilaka, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Shankari Chandran, and Thushanthi Ponweera. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

The past years have seen numerous Sri Lankan writers and those of Sri Lankan origin make their mark on the literary awards circuit. Recently, V.V. Ganeshananthan won the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel Brotherless Night, which took 18 years to write. Australian-Tamil author of Sri Lankan Tamil heritage, Shankari Chandran, won the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her third novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, which is set in contemporary Australia and 1980s Sri Lanka; her first book Song of the Sun God is being adapted for television, starring Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran.

 
Author V.V. Ganeshananthan

Author V.V. Ganeshananthan | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

Shehan Karunatilaka’s Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won the 2022 Booker Prize, while his debut novel Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize. Vajra Chandrasekera’s debut novel The Saint of Bright Doors was recently awarded the Nebula award for best novel, Locus first novel award and 2024 Crawford award, and was shortlisted for a Hugo award. In 2021, Sri Lankan Tamil author Anuk Arudpragasam was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his second novel A Passage North; previously, his first novel The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), won the DSC Prize for South Asian fiction.

 
Sri Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam

Sri Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Sri Lankans — both resident in the island and in the diaspora — have been telling their stories for decades, but when literature is shaped by the marketplace and writing is ascribed value by literary gatekeepers of the western world, perhaps the world hasn’t been ready to hear these stories.

 

“The idea that Sri Lankan creative writing in English has come into the spotlight only recently is possible only when we focus on the international awards Sri Lankan writers have been winning of late. But writers living in Sri Lanka, as well as diasporic authors have been writing for a long time,” says Neloufer de Mel, Senior Professor of English (Chair) at the University of Colombo. “What has happened now is that a generation of Sri Lankan writers, who are between 30 and 50 years of age, are writing on the Sri Lankan war, its society, and its politics in new ways and voices. They also belong to a more global generation with international links and so, have been successful in getting their work internationally published and in circulation. It is this generational shift that I think is important to mark, and what is exciting is their new voices, figurative imaginations, use of language, and the stories they tell.”

Writing as a team sport

In the 90s and early 2000s, writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, Shyam Selvadurai, Carl Muller and Michelle de Kretser were also successful in publishing internationally and reaching wider audiences. Currently, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Amanda Jayatissa, Nizrana Farook, Thushanthi Ponweera and Shyala Smith are among the new crop of writers making their mark in science fiction, thriller, and children’s writing, internationally. Their books display inventiveness in form and explore a variety of themes drawing from Buddhist mythology, Sri Lanka’s socio-political history, its civil war and more.

Author Shehan Karunatilaka

Author Shehan Karunatilaka | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

“I think it is always nice when writing — which can be very solitary — becomes more of a team sport where you are able to cheer for other people who are interested in the themes, ideas, people and communities that you are, and who have their own approaches and language and energy that they’re bringing. It just makes the conversation so much more interesting and exciting and less lonely. I think it’s the beginning of great things, hopefully, to come for writing connected to Sri Lanka and I hope that it will expand so that those who are working in Sinhala and Tamil also get more of the spotlight because I know remarkable work has been taking place in these languages for a really long time,” says novelist Ganeshananthan, who is based in the U.S.

 
Author Thushanthi Ponweera

Author Thushanthi Ponweera | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

While writing and publishing in English remains a niche market in Sri Lanka, the country has a long literary tradition of Sinhala and Tamil writing. Although there has been little overlap in recent years, there are ongoing efforts to encourage translations and cross-pollination between the three languages. “Translations are very important because this is the way you get to read each other’s work, particularly in monolingual societies as in Sri Lanka. There are very few people who work in literary translation here and this is a great setback. The Gratiaen Trust has offered the H.A.I. Goonetilleke Prize for translation of creative writing from Sinhala and Tamil into English since 2003 to encourage such translations,” says de Mel, former chair of the Gratiaen Trust. “University departments of English and Sinhala have also added translation, either as a course or module, into their curricula in Sri Lanka. These are good initiatives, but we need a concerted effort to encourage and train more literary translators because this is a special field in its own right.”

Author Shankari Chandran

Author Shankari Chandran | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

Long road to publishing

While there is a welcome spotlight on stories about Sri Lanka, the road to publication remains long. In interviews, author Karunatilaka has spoken of the struggle to get Seven Moons published. It was seen as a ‘difficult’ book by many — the only publisher willing to take it on was an independent firm, Sort Of Books, based in the U.K.

Author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

In 2022, Sri Lanka faced its worst economic crisis since independence, and is currently rebuilding from the aftershock. In a bid to increase government revenue, the state has imposed taxes on previously exempt industries such as publishing. For writers based in Sri Lanka, this is yet another challenge to overcome. “The price of books [fiction] is exorbitant, so writers find it hard to access contemporary fiction. Writers need to read and when a country levies high taxes on books, it dampens critical thinking and creativity,” says Ramya Jirasinghe, who recently won the 2023 Gratiaen prize for her unpublished novel, Father Cabraal’s Recipe for Love Cake.

 
A generation of Sri Lankan writers, who are between 30 and 50 years of age, are writing on the Sri Lankan war, its society, and its politics in new ways and voices.

A generation of Sri Lankan writers, who are between 30 and 50 years of age, are writing on the Sri Lankan war, its society, and its politics in new ways and voices. | Photo Credit: Getty Images

But for many Sri Lankan writers, the recent spotlight on Sri Lankan stories is encouraging. “If you accept how small this country is, how small our reading/writing population in English is, and how hard it is for local writers to access resources, what is happening now is groundbreaking. Shehan and Ashok [Ferrey] have broken into global markets becoming trailblazers for others and have shown that it can be done from Sri Lanka,” says Jirasinghe. “Sri Lanka is very unique even within South Asia, which means that our stories really must leave these shores and encounter readers from around the world.”

The writer is based in Colombo.

 

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