A ‘home’ of many stories
Concluding our series on the Gratiaen Prize shortlisted writers we feature Uvini Atukorala
The 2021 winner will be announced on June 22. The event will be livestreamed at 6.30 p.m. Facebook page.
Uvini Atukorala is a hard bitten bibliophile. She will tell you that, at Methodist College (where that Christian institution has a proud literary tradition), they would write reams – for essay competitions and plays – and when at home she would finish off homework eagerly to slip into a book or a magazine picked off a house full of them.
It is the kind of passion only the most hardcore mind-travellers can venture into for Uvini reads widely: An Agatha Christie is juxtaposed with a more laborious Kazuo Ishiguro, then comes a dash of humour from the likes of Jonas Jonasson.
“You don’t think much of it as a child but as an adult, I’ve long been grateful to my parents for having got me into reading early. It’s a gift you give your child for the rest of its life. Not everyone who reads, writes of course. But I would think it would be difficult to write if you don’t enjoy reading.”
These days, she says she reads a lot of stories from Africa and West Asia.
However her collection of short stories titled ‘A Place Called Home’ which was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize 2021, is to do with Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans.
As she said in her entry, the stories “explore Sri Lankan identity, and what it means to belong. They feature Sri Lankans of diverse ages, occupations, ethnicities and religions living within the country and at times outside of it, and examine what it takes to call a place home.”
However she had only written sporadically before setting herself the task of completing the collection during the COVID-19 lockdowns. “As difficult as that period was, it also created the time and space I needed to write and I knew I should make the most of it. I do a full-time job and it is a challenge to find the time to write.”
“The beauty of writing a story is that you are the creator of it and you can spin it the way you want to. Sri Lanka also lends itself easily to storytelling given the people of diverse communities and religions that we have here, the legends and history. Plus, there always seems to be something happening here so I don’t think we’ll run out of material for writing any time soon.”
Uvini gets ideas from a myriad things: a chance comment dropped at dinner or something she observes from the corner of an eye. It’s all serendipity from there,
as she lets the story grow with the vagaries of her imagination.
As for the content? “The stories feature diverse characters ranging from cookery teachers to retired tea planters, doctors to priests. They cut across age groups and ethnic lines. They tell of characters who look back on their lives, and those who risk it all for an uncertain future.
“There is a young man who takes a telephone call to a woman he barely knows but who might become his wife, a woman who examines her own marriage in light of her sister’s wedding, a little girl who interacts with a seller of fish, a young mother who tries to keep alive in herself and her daughter stories from the country they had left behind.”
Each of the stories is self-contained but Uvini enjoyed having ‘some common ideas’ that subtly pulled the stories together. These were ideas that interested her like the concepts of identity and belonging and migration – and how they work together.
Says Uvini, “These ideas are stronger now perhaps than when I wrote the stories. There is no stock answer to the question what a Sri Lankan identity is, but the characters in the stories navigate these ideas on their own terms whether they reside in Sri Lanka, or whether they are far from home...”