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| Sunday, 26 February 2006 |
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Shyam Selvadurai is the author of the brilliant, ground-breaking and internationally acclaimed novel Funny Boy, a story of growing up gay in Sri Lanka amidst the long-standing conflict between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities.
Shyam Selvadurai was born in 1965 in Sri Lanka. He went to Canada with his family at the age of nineteen. He has studied creative writing and theatre, and has a B.F.A. from York University.
Funny Boy, his first novel, was published to immediate acclaim in 1994, was a national bestseller, and won the W. H. SmithBooks in Canada First Novel Award and, in the U.S., The Lambda Literary Award, and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Cinnamon Gardens, his second novel, was shortlisted for the Trillium Award. It has been published in the U.S., the U.K., India, and numerous countries in Europe.
Cinnamon Gardens, his second novel, was published in 1998 and was shortlisted for the Trillium Award.
Funny Boy
A marvellous first novel, about growing up gay in Sri Lanka. Selvadurai, weaves a spider web of a narrative in Funny Boy, a delicate yet potent first novel....While Although we follow young Arjie through almost a decade of his life and witness his awakening homosexuality, this book is, happily, much more than a coming-of age (and coming out) novel. Selvadurai's rich prose style, gently spiced with humour, captures the political as well as the personal in Arjie's world.
Although this falls into the crowded coming-of-age category, Selvadurai adds the foreign, funny, and unusual....Through the details of family life, the intimacies and exchanges, Selvadurai, much like E. M. Forster, reveals truths subtly, with poignancy and grace.
Funny Boy won the Lambda Literary Foundation's Award for Best Gay Male Novel as well as the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award for 1994.
Cinnamon Gardens
The highly anticipated, magnificent second novel by Selvadurai, THIS MASTERFUL NOVEL is set in the gracious, repressive, and complex world of 1920s Ceylon (Sri Lanka) among the upper classes.
This is a world where a young woman's destiny was a good marriage and where a man's private desires would be suppressed, held secret, in order to preserve the appearance of the status quo and to honour his wife and child, however high the personal stakes.
Set among the upper classes in the gracious, repressive and complex world of 1920s Ceylon (Sri Lanka), this evocative novel tells the story of two people who must determine if it is possible to pursue personal happiness without compromising the happiness of others.
A young teacher, Annalukshmi, whose splintered family attempts to arrange an appropriate marriage for her, must decide whether the independence she craves will doom her to a life without love and companionship. It is also the story of Balendran who, respectably married, must suppress-or confront-the secret desires for men that threaten to throw his life into chaos.
With sensuous atmosphere and vivid prose, this masterfully plotted novel re-creates a world where a beautiful veneer of fragrant gardens and manners hides social, personal, and political issues still relevant today.
Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers
Writers of South Asian descent have been garnering more and more success, acclaim, and attention. Story-Wallah gathers the finest South Asian voices in fiction for the first time in a single volume that includes a rich array of experiences, settings, and characters: first-generation Americans, members of the upper class in Bombay, Buddhists in Sri Lanka. The stories bring out universal themes of identity, culture, and home.
As Shyam Selvadurai writes in his introduction, "The stories jostle up against each other....The effect is a marvellous cacophony that reminds me of...one of those South Asian bazaars, a bargaining, carnival-like milieu; the goods on sale in this instance being stories hawked by story-traders.
Story-wallahs." This anthology is essential reading for anyone with an interest in South Asian writers and the dynamic, important tales they have to tell.
Swimming in the Monsoon Sea
The setting is Sri Lanka, 1980, and it is the season of monsoons. Fourteen-year-old Amrith is caught up in the life of the cheerful, well-to-do household in which he is being raised by his vibrant Auntie Bundle and kindly Uncle Lucky. He tries not to think of his life "before," when his doting mother was still alive.
Amrith's holiday plans seem unpromising: he wants to appear in his school's production of Othello and he is learning to type at Uncle Lucky's tropical fish business. Then, like an unexpected monsoon, his cousin arrives from Canada and Amrith's ordered life is storm-tossed. He finds himself falling in love with the Canadian boy. Othello, with its powerful theme of disastrous jealousy, is the backdrop to the drama in which Amrith finds himself immersed.
In this, his first young adult novel, Selvadurai explores first love
with clarity, humour,and compassion. Swimming in the Monsoon Sea was
nominated for the Governor General's Literary Awards 2005, (Children's
Literature, Text).
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