To anyone who knows her, it is clear Jean Arasanayagam is her own most penetrating, most persistent interrogator. In a dance that her readers are familiar with, Jean asks the questions and then finds the answers in her poetry and prose, in fact and fiction. This is nowhere more evident than in latest collection of … Continue reading
There are 54 in all – some names you will know, others you will not. The author whose seminal novel is described as the ‘starting point of Sinhala literature’; the poet, disappeared in the last phase of the war, who imagines her own ‘fearless death,’; there are the writers who stand astride multiple cultures, born … Continue reading
Considering the timing, it’s a pity Salman Rushdie isn’t giving interviews. It’s been 25 years since the fatwa that turned his life inside out was issued by the Ayatollah, it’s been 10 years since he founded PEN World of Voices Festival in response to 9/11 and it’s been two years since ‘Joseph Anton’, a memoir … Continue reading
There is a time in the wake of her great rage – after she has torn her left breast out, after she has called fire down on the city of Madurai – when a widowed Kannaki finds a moment of quiet by the banks of a river. Across from her boys are tussling, engaged in … Continue reading
What do you say to a man who has kept you waiting for five years? Before us stands author and poet Vikram Seth; shirt open to the waist, hair tousled by hands and breeze, he’s uncertain of who we are and why we have come to intrude on him. I’m wet from the hips down, … Continue reading
As you sit here, reading these words, trillions of neutrinos are streaming right through you; as if you were a sieve, they pass unnoticed through your clothes, through your skin and bone, through the chair you are sitting on and the floor of the room you’re in. They pass right through the Earth itself and … Continue reading
Among all the pens carried in to South Africa in the early 1980s was one that concealed a secret. Hidden in its casing was a microfilm, a mini-reproduction of an extraordinary book that would soon be printed and distributed widely through underground, anti-apartheid networks. Published originally by a Sri Lankan professor in distant Australia, it … Continue reading
Howard Martenstyn was only 12 years old when his brother threw him overboard. Cedric and he were on a boat off the coast of Trincomalee and Howard didn’t know how to swim. Suffice to say, he learned quickly. He adored his older brother and from him he also learned to love the world’s wild places … Continue reading
As they enter the room, Russell ‘Teats’ Peters and Clayton ‘Toots’ Peters split up. Russell, one of the world’s most successful comedians, steps to the front where a long table is set up for the news conference. Watchful elder brother, Clayton sits right at the back. This is their fourth time on a major tour, … Continue reading
By the time I heard Sonali Deraniyagala’s voice over a Skype call, I had been waiting for months to talk to her. In that interval, I had read and re-read her impossibly poignant memoir Wave while watching the reviews proliferate online. Praise abounded (Michael Ondaatje dubbed it ‘the most powerful and haunting book’ he had … Continue reading
Smriti Daniel 