‘When I write, I allow the novel to do what it should do’
Whose debut novel has won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, as well as the DSC Prize for Literature this year, speaks to about matters of craft.
Rohini Mohan, who won the coveted Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in 2015, for her own novel set in Sri Lanka, The Seasons of Trouble, has lauded The Story of a Brief Marriage. “Anuk has taken what is actually a sliver of a story, the briefest of moments, and suffused it with meaning. His spare, meditative writing lets the pain and delirium of conflict unfold, sometimes just through an injured bird.”
The Story of a Brief Marriage was recently also awarded the DSC Prize for Literature. There, his book was chosen above Anjali Joseph’s The Living, Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day, Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs and Stephen Alter’s In the Jungles of the Night .
Arudpragasam at present is on the verge of completing his PhD in philosophy from the United States of America. He said, “I applied to a PhD programme where I was given a funding for seven years. I had no interest in academics. I wanted to use this time as much as I could to write.”
He said he knew that he wanted to be an author in his early 20s. “I was reading quite a lot of books on philosophy in order to find answers about life. But sometime, when I was 2122, I realised that philosophy can’t provide me with the much-needed answers. It was literature I needed to look at for those queries about life. Literature could respond to me because I feel it is connected to real life.”
“Probably most of my time I spend with my text is through revision,” said Arudpragasam, on being quizzed about his writing process by Guardian 20. “I do a lot of revision. I recall an incident right now. Once during school, I was taken to Gobi Desert where we saw a certain rock formation glistening with sand. I was told that this is due to the attrition of wind. The wind has brought many thousand particles of sand from probably a long distance and now glistens. This is what exactly revision for me is. I go through the text till it achieves this perfect final quality.”
The Story of a Brief Marriage will also be translated into French, German, Dutch and Italian.