Romesh Gunesekera is an internationally acclaimed author whose debut novel, Reef, was Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1994. He was born in 1954 in Sri Lanka, where he spent his early years. Before coming to Britain, he also lived in the Philippines. His debut short-story collection Monkfish Moon was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1993. In 1998, he received the inaugural BBC Asia Award for Achievement in Writing & Literature for his novel The Sandglass. Romesh Gunesekera was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004. Romesh Gunesekera received a National Honour in Sri Lanka in 2005. He has been a Guest Director at the Cheltenham Festival, For four years, until 2013, Romesh Gunesekera was on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature.
Romesh Gunesekera has been a judge for several literary prizes including the Caine Prize for African Writing, the David Cohen Literature Prize, the Forward Prize for Poetry, and most recently the Granta 2013 list of the Best of Young British Novelists. In 2015 Romesh Gunesekera was the Chair of Judges for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Romesh Gunesekera was a Judge for the International Booker Prize 2024.
In an Exclusive Interview with Nitish Raj; Editor-in-Chief, The Literary Mirror the acclaimed author talks about his literary journey along with the various facades of writing.
Q.1 How has your journey been from having your early stories being published in Stand Magazine and Granta to be the esteemed Jury Member of the International Booker Prize 2024?
RG: A long journey, but one in which I count myself lucky. Those first stories were immediately noticed, and my first books did better than anyone would have predicted. The stories were unlike anything else being written at the time, and the books were also very different: slim, artistic in intent, political in content and, I hope, clear to a reader’s eye. My writing in the 80s and 90s had to be pathbreaking and open up the English literary world. In judging the International Booker Prize for translated fiction I am carrying on that project, forty years on.
Q.2 Being originally from Sri Lanka, you have lived in the Philippines and Great Britain also. How has this shaped the theme of your novels, and has it impacted your writing process?
RG: Where you live and write has a significant impact on how you write. My early years in Sri Lanka made me a reader, my years in the Philippines made me want to be a writer, and England helped make me the writer I am.
Q.3 Your debut novel; Reef was Shortlisted for Booker Prize in 1994. How has this esteemed honour raised expectations from you as an author for your upcoming works?
RG: The biggest impact of that shortlisting was that it gave me an international readership I didn’t realize I could have. At that time, it was rare for a first novel to get on the shortlist, and the prize itself had a greater significance. There weren’t so many other prizes, and it had prime-time coverage. Reef therefore was big news. And it is a book that people are still discovering as a fresh and absorbing read. Interestingly it is now being rediscovered as a pioneer ecological text. This year it also had its first outing as a Sinhala novel.
Q.4 ‘The Match’ is a pathbreaking novel on cricket, a game which is not less than a religion in Sri Lanka and India. How important is the role of Sports in diluting the intrinsic pain of an individual caught in the labyrinth of identity crisis?
RG: That is the question that Sunny, the main character in the book, is exploring. What does identity and loyalty in sport tell us about who we are and where we belong? I thought cricket, with its intrinsic artistic form, would be the ideal way to approach identity. It was also a sport that had never had a central role in a literary novel before. It was about time. Now, of course, we have a whole genre of cricket novels.
Q.5 Your short-story collection, ‘Monkfish Moon’, was your debut work. How much does the process of short-story collection writing differ from writing a novel and when are we going to have the next short story collection of yours?
RG: To carry on the cricket metaphor: the novel is a test match, the short story is a one-day match. The process is different mainly in terms of the time element. Or to use another metaphor from The Match, one is a photograph, the other a movie.
Noontide Toll is a collection of stories to match Monkfish Moon. I now have another collection close to completion. The timing will depend on the enthusiasm of a publisher.
Q.6 Your latest novel Suncatcher, talks about divided loyalties and endangered friendships where you return to the era of your debut novel. How much various human relations get entangled in the cobweb of individuality in such a phase of time?
RG: Yes, it does return to that earlier period but largely as a consequence of the previous book I had written: Noontide Toll, which in turn was a response to the aftermath of the long war in Sri Lanka. With Suncatcher, I wanted to write about the period before that war started. To explore the world as it was before the trauma of that period and to see whether the seeds of the future could be seen even then.
Q.7 What would be your suggestion to the aspiring authors?
RG: Two things: read as extensively and widely as you can; write as regularly as you can. Both should be habits you cannot give up.
