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
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I find anonymous music frees me best. Chinese pop can be perfect. I can't decipher anything on the CD label; there is nothing I can hang on to.
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To my mind, forgetting is a risky strategy for living. Memory is essential to us. It is DNA. We need to remember, and we need to imagine. That's why we have books, writing, fiction.
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When I was growing up, I don't think I knew any other child who had been out of Sri Lanka.
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Two of the first plays I saw after I arrived in Britain were 'King Lear' in Liverpool, and 'Antony and Cleopatra' at Stratford. One was produced with hardly a backdrop and the other with gigantic scene changes. I was impressed by what connected the two: the words and their life beyond the stage.
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Sure, cricket on a beach on the isle of Jura is different from a Test match in a stadium in Galle, 6000 miles away, despite the sea air.
understanding
Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.
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Whether we live in Sri Lanka or Malaysia or India, the U.K. or the U.S., we face similar issues of understanding, remembering the past that has made us and seeing the future we want.
With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.
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Whether it is better to forget and let wounds heal or remember and learn from the past is a crucial question for all of us, wherever we are.
appealing
The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic.
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A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.
As a youngster, I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that's a disguise for being a writer.
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Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.
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The nationalist movement supported Sinhala by suppressing Tamil; there were competing nationalisms. It was a fundamental mistake to make parallel streams in education - or a calculated political gamble. Politicians were playing with it.