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
wiser
The old idea that you grow wiser as you get older, and you learn from your elders, is actually completely wrong.
bunch means organised particular
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.
escape imprisoned means novels time understand
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.
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.
might nursery peace war
You might want to write 'War and Peace,' but that might not be who you are. You might be better off with nursery rhymes.
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.
anonymous best cd chinese decipher hang music pop
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.
appealing
The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic.
dangerous desire fiction forget seek seems technology troubling
It seems to me that we live in dangerous times all over the world: we have the technology to remember everything but a desire to forget the troubling and to seek the safety of numbness. Fiction can do something about that.
With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.
understanding
Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.
future issues malaysia seeing similar whether
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.