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
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.
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.
child growing knew
When I was growing up, I don't think I knew any other child who had been out of Sri Lanka.
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.
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.
essential forgetting risky
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.
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.
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.
historical
We live in a world which is changing very fast. What seems contemporary now will be historical in two years.