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
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.
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.
almost berlin came dealing east europe fantastic found situation stuff wall writers wrote
I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.
means relationship time
Language is the means by which we negotiate our relationship with time.
imagined people
People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.
childhoods smoothed tends
Most childhoods are full of anxiety, but that tends to get smoothed over, so you have a sense of nostalgia.
controls future interested power present
Who controls the present controls the past. There's a power structure, if you like, between the present and the past and the future, and that's what I'm interested in.
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.
chance couple extremely father jobs lucky nobody question travel
I was very lucky - it wasn't a question of being wealthy; my father was just extremely lucky with the couple of jobs he got. So we got a chance to travel when nobody else could travel.
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.