It’s easy to assume that once you have stood on the summit of Everest, the world laid out before you, that no other climb will offer quite the same challenge. However, hanging from ropes on the icy face of Aconcagua’s glacier in South America, their bodies shuddering uncontrollably with cold, their fingers at risk of … Continue reading
RIP, Devil Dance. This week, in our Q&A with author Shehan Karunatilaka we take a moment to grieve for the much-anticipated manuscript that earned him a place on the shortlist for the 2016 Gratiaen, and gain some consolation in word of two new books and the possibility Chinaman might live again as a mini-series for … Continue reading
Southern Province, Sri Lanka – Lochana is 10 years old. Every morning, he gets up and lights an incense stick, which he places in a three-wheeled auto-rickshaw parked outside the family home in Sri Lanka‘s coastal Southern Province. The vehicle is a bright shade of pink and as the fragrant smoke fills the interior, Lochana says a … Continue reading
Vraie Balthazar remembers thinking: “This can’t be normal.” Her periods had taken on a kind of life of their own. She would bleed not just three or four days, but seven days. Her sanitary napkins needed to be changed every two hours. She would layer them together, two-pads deep, to make a kind of adult … Continue reading
Standing at just 4’11, Thilini Gunasekera is used to being dismissed. It happened when she wanted to join the Air Force and study aeronautical engineering – she didn’t meet the height requirement. It happened again when she stepped into a classroom full of men to study how to become an automobile mechanic – except this … Continue reading
Exciting research based on finds at the Fa-Hien Lena (cave) in Kalutara are transforming anthropologists’ understanding of how Homo sapiens moved through our world some 45,000 years ago, while offering an explanation for why we are today the solitary survivors from a family tree that once included other hominins such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus. … Continue reading
… …A few hours south of the capital, the gardens at Lunuganga are still and quiet. Over the lake, clouds are gathering with the promise of rain. My guide and I go for long stretches without seeing anyone else. Pointing out places of interest, Isuru Randeni leads the way. Lunuganga was Bawa’s magnum opus, a … Continue reading
