The diasporic rebel comes home
The Galle Literary Festival returns this year, from January 25-28; albeit on a smaller scale, with some exciting new names, among them Mary Beard, the world’s most famous classicist, Simon Schama, iconic British historian of ‘History of Britain’ fame, Tom Parker Bowles, celebrity food writer not to mention all the returning favourites like Anthony Horowitz, Alexander McCall Smith, Tishani Doshi and Sebastian Faulkes. There are also the local heavyweights – Booker winner Shehan Karunatillaka, Lankan-born Romesh Gunasekera as well as exciting new names such as Cynthia Shanmugalingam, Amanda Jayatissa and Nizrana Farook to catch up with. Add to this an array of culinary, musical, poetical, theatrical and archaeological delights that will spice up what has become one of the world’s best-loved literary festivals and Galle with its old-world setting is a sortie for not only the lover of books but culture in general in the company of congenial souls...
Full programme and tickets for the Galle Literary Festival are available on galleliteraryfestival.com. While tickets will be available from the box office during the festival, the organizers suggest booking online to avoid disappointment. Email glfboxofc2024@
for ticketing queries and assistance.
Guy Gunaratne has the unmistakable air of the diasporic rebel, searching for meaning in a graffiti-covered London. This is reflected in his novel In Our Mad and Furious City for which he won the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize in the UK and the Authors Club Award, whilst being shortlisted for the Booker. He also wrote Mister, Mister, hailed as “an exuberantly imaginative novel of Britishness and unbelonging”.
In his first appearance at the Galle Literary Festival this year, Guy will talk on Radical Fiction alongside Yudhanjaya Wijeratne and Nayomi Munaweera, and also have a special conversation on Mister, Mister with Devana Senanayake.
It’s your first GLF; what does it feel like coming back to your ancestral land as a successful writer?
I actually think Sri Lanka may have transformed just as much – at least in terms of the aspirations of its people – since my last visit. I was previously here in 2013, and with everything that has happened since, I am more interested in hearing from local writers, journalists and artists and what they have to say about the country’s future. I’ll be sure to catch various writers at their talks at GLF.
The London you depict in In Our Mad and Furious City, is it the London you yourself knew? How similar is it and how different to your own?
It’s similar in the sense that the localised setting is the one I grew up around. The dialect the young male characters are speaking with in the novel – a rich, elastic idiom, infused with an inherited multi-cultural rhythm – is very much the sort I’m familiar with. It is very much the London that I, and those of my generation recognise: a city teetering on the edge of catastrophe, but also intoxicating for its hybridity, offering possibilities for new forms of expression.
Have you read any Sri Lankan writing that also deal with issues like dissonance -- like Ashok Ferrey or Shyam Selvadurai? How far are you able to empathize with these writers who also have ‘an elsewhere in their blood’?
No, I looked forward to reading more. I’ve read a Selvadurai and others, the likes of Anuk Arudpragasam for instance. As for those who have been gifted with ‘elsewheres in their blood’, these are my kin.
Can you give us an idea of the path you burrowed through books; what were the most influential reads in your life - in childhood and adulthood? Why? Seminal authors in your life? How?
My reading has been varied but has always been voracious. The earliest most significant writers were the American Jewish authors. Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Chaim Potok, for example. The way these writers insisted on embodying both their American identities – modern, bold, confident – but also their Jewish heritage – ancient roots, spiritual traditions – offered me a way to navigate my own diasporic path. I’ve always been drawn to writers who are unafraid to claim many perspectives at once, and can produce novels that are layered with a kind of richness of origin. Angela Carter is another, whose books are like spinning carousels. Then there are Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, James Baldwin and Günter Grass, all of whom offered works that engage with the troubles of world around them, sometimes in expressly political ways, but with a deep humanism and a playfulness of language.
Can you give us a bit of backgroundwhere you schooled, parents, their roots in Sri Lanka?
Both my parents were born in Sri Lanka. My father emigrated to London in the 1950s as a teenager, and my mother, after she married him, in the 1980s. I went to school in London, though for a year in 1996 my parents had me schooled at Stafford International School in Colombo. I enjoyed my one year there.
Can we speak about your career as a filmmaker- is it more intrinsic to you than your writing? Does the visual allow you to articulate yourself better than the verbal?
I was a human rights documentary filmmaker in my 20s. I was interested in stories that mattered, and felt it very deeply as a vocation. There are gestures I could make in visual art that I wouldn’t have attempted elsewhere. But we move toward different forms because of their unique capacities for experiences. For instance, I’m inclined toward the novel form because it allows for an intimacy that can’t be reproduced elsewhere. I’m interested in theatre because of its public, communal aspect, as well as its collaborative processes. I wouldn’t say one allows for better articulacy, but each allows for a distinct expression, and I enjoy the variety.
Can we speak about your work as a journalist- does it involve heavy investigating?
I covered stories beginning with the end of civil war in Sri Lanka as a student journalist in 2009. After that, I reported on press freedom issues in Guatemala, produced a feature documentary in Uganda on formerly abducted child soldiers, and reported on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong in 2011. Since then, I have mostly worked in narrative arts.
Something about your literary output other than the novels, and what can we expect in the future?
I am currently working on two plays, one concerns Israel’s actions in Gaza, and another is an adaptation of Mister, Mister for the stage.