Romesh Gunesekera
Romesh Gunesekera
Romesh Gunesekera FRSLis a Sri Lankan-born British author, who was a finalist in the Man Booker Prize for his novel Reef in 1994. He is currently the Chair of the Judges of Commonwealth Short Story Prize competition for 2015...
NationalitySri Lankan
ProfessionAuthor
common fellow
Cricket fans all over the world probably have more in common with each other than with their fellow citizens.
age books certainly met writers
I've met writers who wanted to be writers from the age of six, but I certainly had no feelings like that. It was only in the Philippines when I was about 15 that I started reading books by very contemporary writers of the Beatnik generation.
almost binds call carries divide form however longing might politics visitor war welsh whatever wherever
Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide them.
slightly
At 16, I started reading trashy stuff, anything slightly naughty and risque.
anchor butter lamb meant word zealand
'Commonwealth' is not a word I ever used growing up in Colombo. There, in the late 1950s, it would have meant little more than New Zealand lamb and Anchor butter at the cold stores.
childhoods smoothed tends
Most childhoods are full of anxiety, but that tends to get smoothed over, so you have a sense of nostalgia.
almost berlin came dealing east europe fantastic found situation stuff wall writers wrote
I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.
chance couple extremely father jobs lucky nobody question travel
I was very lucky - it wasn't a question of being wealthy; my father was just extremely lucky with the couple of jobs he got. So we got a chance to travel when nobody else could travel.
controls future interested power present
Who controls the present controls the past. There's a power structure, if you like, between the present and the past and the future, and that's what I'm interested in.
historical
We live in a world which is changing very fast. What seems contemporary now will be historical in two years.
architecture curiously england found history imperial post return town
To come to England in the 1970s was to return to this strange other-world of half-known history. I found the imperial architecture curiously familiar: the post office, the town hall, the botanic gardens.
act against though time
For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.
escaped known might oddly
My first inkling of what the Commonwealth might really mean came only when I escaped the oddly British-tinged Asia I had known and went to live in the Philippines.
contend enables trying
Imaginative writing, to me, is a way of discovering who we are and what we have to contend with; discovering what is out there and also what is not there. It enables me to think and explore and make something new with language while trying to make sense of our lives.