• Savin Edirisinghe on winning the 2025 Gratiaen Prize and writing in a language not his own

On 1 June, Savin Edirisinghe was awarded the 32nd Gratiaen Prize for his short story collection ‘Kata Katha: Gossip, Rumours, and Idle Talk.’ 

The win marked not just a personal milestone but a profound cultural moment for young Sri Lankan writers as well, especially those navigating the space between the Sinhala and English languages. At 25, Savin is also one of the youngest winners of the Gratiaen Prize, and ‘Kata Katha’ was his debut publication.

Following his win, The Sunday Morning Brunch sat down with Savin for a chat on what the experience had been like and to talk about ‘Kata Katha’ itself. 

“I’m feeling overwhelmed to be honest, but in a good way,” Savin shared about his win. “I can’t lie, I do love the attention too. As a writer, or more broadly, someone in entertainment, you’re always working and looking for that one break – that something that gets people to actually look at your work. I am in that transitionary phase now, so I feel a mix of overwhelmed and hopeful.”

Overcoming challenges

Savin’s win is also momentous for another reason. 

The Gratiaen Prize is Sri Lanka’s most prestigious literary award for creative writing in English, founded in 1993 by Michael Ondaatje to recognise and support outstanding literary work by Sri Lankan writers. However, Savin’s first language is not necessarily English; it is a far more nuanced story, one that began in a Sinhala-speaking home in Galle, where neither of Savin’s parents spoke English. 

“I only started learning English at nine when I was put into an international school,” Savin explained. “My parents couldn’t help me with homework and couldn’t read my stories. But they believed English would open doors for me that were closed to them.”

His father, a Sinhala-language writer who completed his degree later in life, had been denied the opportunity to become a university lecturer because he had not studied in English. That moment shaped his decision to raise Savin with access to English. It was a conscious act of generational hope. 

“He made it a point to teach me Sinhala literature too,” Savin said. “Mahagama Sekera, Martin Wickramasinghe, Yamuna Malini – those names were part of my childhood. At the same time, I was reading Oscar Wilde and George Orwell in school, so these two worlds came together, but not always neatly.”

For much of his early life, Savin felt he lacked a mother tongue. “I wasn’t using Sinhala much at school. But English wasn’t mine either. It wasn’t the language I spoke at home. I was stuck somewhere in between, blindly walking between these two languages.”

That sense of in-betweenness was compounded by Savin’s dyslexia, which made both Sinhala and English difficult to grasp. “I used to confuse ‘b’ and ‘d,’” he shared. “My parents thought it was just the switch to English medium. Then we found a retired teacher named Rupa who taught English phonetically. She changed everything for me. She passed away during the Covid-19 pandemic, but I owe her so much.”

Savin’s relationship with Sinhala recomplicated. Dyslexia made reading and writing in Sinhala slow as well, and he often mixes up similar-looking letters, just as he does when reading English sometimes. But literature in both languages remained his anchor. “Even now, I read Sinhala slower than English. I learnt English; I acquired Sinhala.”

The making of ‘Kata Katha’

The seeds of ‘Kata Katha’ were sown during his mentorship with writer Ashok Ferrey. Savin had submitted a story to the ‘2024 Future Writers Programme,’ a competition held under the auspices of the ‘Ceylon Literary and Art Festival,’ in collaboration with Dilmah Tea. His submission, ‘Unmasked,’ won, and the prize was a mentorship with Ferrey. 

“We’d sit and talk over coffee, and Ashok would look at my work. He said: ‘This is good. Publish it in a journal, or put together a collection and submit it for the Gratiaen.’” This encouragement combined with his father’s last wish for him to publish his work pushed Savin to take the plunge, complete his collection of work, and submit it to the Gratiaen Trust for consideration. 

Many of the stories in ‘Kata Katha’ were written spontaneously and filed away. It was only much later that Savin noticed a thematic thread running through them. “They were all stories that came from gossip. Not always directly, but gossip in the broadest sense. Things overheard, things I imagined by looking at other people’s business (which was entirely not my business), or from stories people told me.”

The collection became an ode to the ordinary lives of young people who, as Savin put it, “try so hard to be ordinary, they become extraordinary”. Some stories were recent; others dated back five years. All were reworked to bring in the person he had become. 

“Even the old stories carried the current me,” he reflected. One story in particular that stands out to him is a love letter Savin wrote to his girlfriend on their fourth anniversary. 

“It wasn’t meant to be read by anyone else. But I re-read it and thought, this is good. People should read this. I know that can sound narcissistic, but when reading the letter, you realise it’s really not about me; it’s about her. She’s been a huge inspiration to me. She’s my muse. And she’s full of stories. If she wrote down her own stories, she’d win the Gratiaen too.”

For Savin, gossip is a deeply human experience and an intimate one. “There’s a special bond between couples who gossip,” he said. “They know everything about each other and everyone else. If you tell someone not to share something with their partner, they definitely will.”

Despite the personal nature of some stories, he was careful to protect real identities. “Where I kept names, I asked permission. In many instances, where I do use the name of someone I know, the story actually isn’t even about them. Mostly, I changed things so they didn’t reflect anyone real. I’ve made evil people really evil, good people really good, or swapped things around entirely,” he added.

The process of editing ‘Kata Katha’ was both collaborative and emotional. After his father passed away five months before the Gratiaen submission, one of his last wishes had been for Savin to publish his writing. 

“I made a WhatsApp group with my friends and exposed my soul. I told them: be honest. Fix the grammar. Tell me what works. They came through. The final edits were small, but they made a big difference,” he said.

He also spoke fondly of the Gratiaen judges. “You only meet them at the events, but you feel a connection because they’ve read your thoughts. They’ve read the language of your soul.”

Exploring language, identity and voice

Now in his final year as a BA in English student at the CINEC Campus, Savin is working on several new projects – a novel, a poetry collection in English, and a Sinhala poetry collection intended to be sold only on buses. “That one won’t work in English,” he noted. “It needs to be read in Sinhala.”

He credited Michael Ondaatje’s ‘Running in the Family’ as a key influence, noting how Ondaatje captured a uniquely Sri Lankan sensibility despite writing from abroad. “It’s not about the words; it’s about the thought process. There was something so Sri Lankan in the way he approached memory. That inspired me.”

As for his writing habits, “Completely unstructured,” he laughed. “I was terrible at managing my work. Ideas came at the most random times. I jotted down a sentence and came back to it. The final idea rarely resembled the first one.”

There were even reward systems. “I used to promise myself a cigarette after every 500 words. But then I got addicted. That didn’t work. Writing is a bit of a toxic relationship, but I enjoy it when I do it.”

When asked what advice he had, especially for young Sinhala-speaking writers trying to write in English, Savin was clear if not unorthodox: “Forget about grammar. Language isn’t about morphology or syntax, it’s about thought. You can speak, talk, think, and write in your own way. 

“Grammar isn’t a measure of proficiency. You don’t have to be Shakespeare or Sekera to write. Even if it’s not grammatically correct, there are so many things in this world that haven’t been said yet. You just have to say them in your voice, however it comes out.”

He brought up the example of beach boys, many of whom are multilingual to the point they often speak four or more languages (as part of his university research, Savin is conducting a sociolinguistic study of beach boys who form relationships with people from different cultures and who speak different languages). 

“They often speak this many languages as a form of survival – to get fed. And they get their point across even if they don’t have the strongest command of these languages. They even fall in love with foreigners. If you can use a language enough to get a native person of that language to fall in love with you, then you are proficient in that language, whether or not you’re grammatically correct.” 

With ‘Kata Katha’ set to be published by Sarasavi and a Sinhala translation in the works, Savin’s literary journey is only just beginning. But even now, his win feels like a victory not just for himself, but also for a wider community of young writers charting new territory in between languages, in between traditions, and in between the ordinary and the extraordinary.