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.
means relationship time
Language is the means by which we negotiate our relationship with time.
age almost cricket game innocence rare time wrote
I wrote 'The Match,' my cricket novel, between 2002 and 2005. In retrospect, almost an age of innocence in cricket and a time when it was rare to find the game deep in fiction.
imagined people
People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.
Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades.
works
Sri Lanka is a part of my background: it's not where I live, but it's what I want to explore. And I find it works very well to explore through fiction.
dreamed forms island itself level loves poetry
Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.
although amazingly business coming folk knew legendary life lived parents people places range sportsmen wider women
My parents knew a wider range of people than most, and so we had actors, journalists, politicians, planters, sportsmen and women and business folk all coming in and out of the places we lived in. Although my parents were not wealthy, they lived a legendary and amazingly cosmopolitan life.
countries shaped
My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.
hands passenger reader
A passenger on a road journey is in the hands of a driver; a reader embarking on a book is in the hands of a narrator.
bring erosion nostalgia passing stop time yearning
In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.
felt kid partly somewhere
I probably felt most out of place as a young kid growing up in Sri Lanka. My mental world was somewhere else, partly because of reading and daydreaming.
beauty momentum truth
In writing, I try to find the right balance between momentum and infinity, truth and beauty.
although grew spend throw time
I grew up in Colombo but was lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the countryside as well. Although there was considerable turbulence, even in the 1950s, it did not throw a shadow on my consciousness.