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
understanding
Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.
With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.
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I find anonymous music frees me best. Chinese pop can be perfect. I can't decipher anything on the CD label; there is nothing I can hang on to.
childhoods smoothed tends
Most childhoods are full of anxiety, but that tends to get smoothed over, so you have a sense of nostalgia.
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'Commonwealth' is not a word I ever used growing up in Colombo. There, in the late 1950s, it would have meant little more than New Zealand lamb and Anchor butter at the cold stores.
slightly
At 16, I started reading trashy stuff, anything slightly naughty and risque.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.