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
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.
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.
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.
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.
imagined people
People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.
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.
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.
mean way stories
A novel means a new way of doing a story
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.
With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.
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.
understanding
Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.
historical
We live in a world which is changing very fast. What seems contemporary now will be historical in two years.
architecture curiously england found history imperial post return town
To come to England in the 1970s was to return to this strange other-world of half-known history. I found the imperial architecture curiously familiar: the post office, the town hall, the botanic gardens.