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
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.
certain distance time within
If you are writing something, you automatically create a certain distance. It can be very little. Even within the same city you imaginatively have a certain distance from your subject, and at the same time, you have to have a connection.
I don't think I knew I would be a writer. I wanted to become a writer, and I tried to write.
arrived backdrop beyond britain connected gigantic hardly impressed life plays produced saw scene
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.
child growing knew
When I was growing up, I don't think I knew any other child who had been out of Sri Lanka.
crucial forget heal question wherever whether wounds
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.
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.
act against though time
For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.