• Savin Edirisinghe on ‘Kata Katha’ winning the 32nd Gratiaen Prize, his parents’ dream of him learning English, and being a bilingual writer

The Gratiaen has understandably dominated literary conversations this week, with Savin Edirisinghe announced as the winner at an event held on 31 May. Edirisinghe won for his book ‘Kata Katha: Gossip, Rumours, and Idle Talk’, a book that readers can expect to see on the shelves next week. It will be published by Sarasavi.

Edirisinghe’s Gratiaen win is memorable for many reasons. At 25, he is one of the youngest to have won. The prize, awarded for the 32nd time, is presented by The Gratiaen Trust and recognises annually the best work of English creative writing by a Sri Lankan residing in the country.

However, his acceptance speech is another reason. Edirisinghe spoke about his father’s dream of him learning the English language and his encouragement in submitting ‘Kata Katha’ for the Gratiaen. Edirisinghe’s father passed away before seeing his son receiving the prize, but the young author recalled the impact his father had on him.

In conversation with The Daily Morning, Edirisinghe spoke about his parents’ efforts that have enabled him to write in both Sinhala and English, his approach when writing poetry and prose, and what the Gratiaen win feels like.

Following are excerpts from the interview:

What role did literature and creative writing play in your upbringing?

It comes from my father, who was a very creative person. He was a dramatist and theatre actor, a journalist, a writer, and also did politics. He did both politics and arts together. In my eyes, he didn’t spoil arts with politics or politics with arts but beautifully managed both. I always told him to do arts more than politics, but he leaned more towards the political side because that’s what he learnt in university as well, but I think that’s where my love for literature and reading comes from.

As far as creative writing is concerned, I used to write stories – I called them books and they were A4 sheets filled with big letters and small scribbles. I used to write stories about animals and adventure stories, because I was influenced by ‘Famous Five’ and ‘Secret Seven’.

The specialty was that I was not only reading ‘Famous Five’ and ‘Secret Seven’, I was also listening to Victor Rathnayake and W.D. Amaradeva and dissecting their lyrics, because my father did so. My father used to teach me about creative writing, the creative process, and the arts. He used to read Mahagama Sekara’s ‘Prabuddha’ to me when I was 10 or 11 – it’s one of the greatest Sinhala literary pieces that you can get your hands on.

My Sinhala literary side grew with my English literary side, but the main mentor for my Sinhala literature or creative writing path was my father. When I went to Sussex College, Galle, which is an international school, all the English teachers who taught me helped me to improve myself. Perhaps my father told them or maybe due to knowing my father, they knew I was more inclined towards writing rather than solving mathematical problems or learning about scientific hypotheses.

What went into writing ‘Kata Katha’? What can you tell us about the short stories in this collection?

There are 13 short stories in the collection; some were written over five years ago and some were written very recently. Similarly, some were written over a span of 2-3 months, but some were written during a single day or even several hours. There’s a variety there and this speaks to the thematic aspects of the short stories as well.

One story is very different from the other, but somehow, they are all connected through ‘kata katha’ or gossip, because these are stories that have been told to me, that have been observed by me, or that I have eavesdropped on.

All of them are very ordinary stories about ordinary people but something very extraordinary happens in them. To achieve that, I have used magical realism, but when you go deep into an ordinary setting, person, thing, theme, or event, what happens is that it becomes extraordinary.

We tend to frown upon gossip, rumours, and idle talk, but as you mentioned in your acceptance speech, it was through hearing about them that you learnt about certain things that were foreign to you. How can gossip and idle talk shape language but also knowledge and exposure?

It is a well-known fact in anthropology and sociology that language was invented to communicate, but what they wanted to communicate was gossip. People wanted to tell stuff that happened to them to their family, partner, or offspring. That’s where first pictography was used, then language was invented – to share each other’s stories.

In modern society, the word stories is used as a very serious thing, but it’s not that serious. Story is a synonym for gossip. And the sharing of stories or gossip shape how we think about the world and what we think about the world as well. For example, the person who listens to the most amount of gossip is the most open minded as well, because they know the most amount of information about the world, they know different perspectives. They can come to an understanding of their own nature, a certain event, or a person. So, it’s very important to expose yourself to gossip.

Gossip doesn’t have a language. Gossip basically is a language. If we take the example of beach boys of Sri Lanka, even though they don’t have a formal education in language, they are multilinguals who can speak 4-5 languages. They get their job done. They communicate with foreigners and their lives depend upon it. And they have meaningful relationships with foreigners as well. Some even get married – it’s a very common situation in the south of Sri Lanka nowadays.

To establish love using a language should be the standard of measuring the proficiency level, not IELTS or any other examination. If you can fall in love with a person whose mother tongue is not yours, then you are more than proficient in that language.

The subtitle of this book is ‘Gossip, Rumours, and Idle Talk’. Most people forget the part about idle talk. Idle talk is also a form of gossip. You are either talking to yourself or talking to kill time and at these moments, when you keep on speaking, that’s where the true nature of yourself, your thoughts, and even your soul comes out. It’s unfiltered. And that’s beautiful. That’s where growth and knowledge is being shared and exposed.

What did winning the Gratiaen feel like? What does this recognition mean to you?

It’s fair to say that the Gratiaen has changed my life and I’m very much honoured. If you look at the past Gratiaen winners, they are literary icons, they are giants. So I’m very much honoured and privileged to be among them. I’m very lucky to have won it so early at 25 years of age. The Gratiaen told me that I’m one of or maybe the youngest person to ever win the Gratiaen. It feels like a dream.

Most importantly, there’s a very personal side to winning the Gratiaen. I studied about Michael Ondaatje at university as an undergraduate. Everyone has read ‘The English Patient’ and everyone knows about it, but I met him through his very personal book, ‘Running in the Family’.

When I read it, it felt very Sri Lankan, even though it was written by a person who left Sri Lanka and has lived elsewhere for a long time and even though it was written in English, the language was very different from Sri Lankan standard English. But it had the soul of Sri Lanka. I don’t know how to explain it – it is best to read ‘Running in the Family’. It’s beautiful and after reading it, I thought about how this person had brought a whole new perspective to Sri Lanka and being Sri Lankan. I thought that maybe I can write in this way as well.

Perhaps I found my voice somewhere along the path of reading ‘Running in the Family’ and it was a huge inspiration for me to write ‘Kata Katha’ because, while they are not very similar, they have similarities in terms of structure and how the book is portrayed.

‘Running the Family’ is very personal and ‘Kata Katha’ is also very personal. Even though most of the stories are not my own, they are stories that were told to me and that I listened to. Most of the stories are stories of people I know, even though you can’t recognise them – even they can’t recognise themselves because I have applied poetic licence.

I think the Gratiaen is a great platform for the youth, especially. They have done so much for the youth in the past year, from podcasts to workshops. I highly admire it.

And I admire the judges for judging me with so much kindness and for the Gratiaen trustees and the Gratiaen Trust for continuing the great work that Michael Ondaatje wanted to do. It’s a great opportunity. The Gratiaen should be a doorway, rather than a prize, and it was, it is, and it will be, I’m sure.

Accepting the Gratiaen, you spoke about your parents and their determination to ensure you learnt English. Looking back at your childhood, what role did they play in the path you’ve taken today?

I should mention that I am an only child, so I got special treatment from both my father and my mother. I was the favourite, no competition there.

My father had a dream of becoming a lecturer and an academic, and also of learning English. He was not exposed to English that much and had many difficulties growing up to learn this language. So, he wanted his child to learn this language, and this was the only thing that mattered to him. That’s why he took the risk of putting me into an international school, which was not cheap even back then.

Both didn’t know a word of English and it was very difficult during the beginning of my primary education because they couldn’t help me with my schoolwork, but my mother, I should say patiently and impatiently, taught me the little she knew. She herself studied to help me with homework – my mother and father to a certain extent learnt English so they could help me. They were exposed to it as well through me; I was learning English in school and when I came home, my mother and father were learning English from me to a certain extent, even though I wasn’t a good teacher.

That’s the dream my father had, and he saw me achieving it, but he should have seen it more. Unfortunately, life is ironic in that sense. Life sometimes takes certain things that you need the most, maybe to give something new. That’s how life works and it’s a mysterious thing.

But that’s how my mother and father brought me up to be their dream. They didn’t impose their world view or perspectives on me, but they lived their own dreams through me because I learnt English.

My father made it a point to teach me Sinhala and read me Sinhala literature. If he knew Tamil, I’m pretty sure that he would have exposed me to Tamil literature and language as well. But the language he knew was Sinhala so he exposed me to that language at home.

We have had many conversations, my father and I, very literary, very deep conversations. And every time I quoted an English book, he would find a Sinhala equivalent for it, because I often explained the idea in Sinhala to him. It was like a competition between my father and me: Who has more knowledge?

He had access to translations as well because a lot of English books and even those in other languages have been translated to Sinhala, but I had an upper hand, I thought, because far more books have been translated to English. But somehow, he kept up with me and it was a beautiful thing to share between a son and a father. Normally, what happens is that the father teaches his son how to drive, but in my case, my father didn’t know how to drive and he didn’t have a driving licence, so what he did instead was talk about existentialism, nihilism, deep philosophies, and ideologies about Buddhism.

How did your mother react to your Gratiaen win?

Before I got ready to come to the Gratiaen, my mother called me and said that even though I wouldn’t like it, she would light a candle near my father’s photograph. I’m not much of a religious person and I don’t believe in mysticism, even though my stories have mysticism and magical realism in them,

I said it’s fine, but that if he was around, he would say what nonsense is this because he was like me as well. He was sceptical about these things. But I said it was fine because that’s how she deals with grief. When I won, I called her and I felt the tears coming and she said: “Thaththa hitiyanam…” (If your father was here…)

Maybe even more than me, he wanted me to write these stories and get them published or even submit them to the Gratiaen. So, that’s how she reacted and even now, when I show her the book cover or the editing process, she says: “Thaththa hitiyanam…”

I think she’s observing everything that’s happening right now so she can memorise it, and when she goes away someday, she can meet her husband and tell him everything that she saw about me.

While you were encouraged to go forward with ‘Kata Katha’, you also wrote a collection of poetry in Sinhala. Are you planning on publishing this collection soon?

I’m trying to get it published. I’m sure winning the Gratiaen has helped me in a way to publish my other work. I also have an English poetry collection and hopefully I’ll publish both.

Currently, I have a small seed of an idea growing in my mind for a novel, so perhaps that will come soon as well. And there have been some talks about translating ‘Kata Katha’ into Sinhala. There are lots of projects and I’ll allow time, faith, and my laziness to control how those projects are carried out.

Tell us more about your poetry. Does your approach to writing in English differ from your approach to writing in Sinhala?

Poetry is my way of explaining my ideas and thoughts in both languages. There’s a poem I wrote a while ago, which is in English, but the title is in Singlish: ‘Bilingual Sankara’. In it, I talk about a quotation by the European ruler Charlemagne, who says: ‘To have another language is to possess a second soul’. At the end of my poem, I argued that I have English and Sinhala, but I felt like those two languages or those two souls cancelled each other out and that I may have no soul.

Sometimes, you feel that way. People think if you are bilingual or multilingual, it is very easy to understand or explain the world. That’s true, but it’s very difficult to express your own thoughts and ideas, because when an idea comes to your mind, the first thing you think is: ‘Which language am I going to choose to write this in?’

If you are very good at it, you’ll select it instantaneously and you’ll write it in that language. But I’m pretty bad at it, so I sit there and wait for some time before choosing the language I want to write the idea in.

When this happens, sometimes the idea goes away, and I’m left with depression. This happens a lot in prose, but in poetry, I think I’m getting pretty good at it because now, when an idea comes to my mind, I know whether I need to write it in English or Sinhala.

I should say though that Sinhala poetry feels much closer to my heart than English poetry – and even English theatre as well. Even though I love Shakespear and contemporary drama such as Tennessee Williams, nothing can beat the feeling of watching a Sinhala stage drama or reading a Sinhala poem.

I don’t know why that is, but maybe it is because Sinhala is my mother tongue.

There are certain themes, for example, nostalgia. I feel nostalgia in my heart when I read English poetry rather than Sinhala poetry. Love is 50-50 for me. I feel the same sense of love in English poetry and prose and Sinhala poetry and prose. But if we take a theme like war, I feel it more when I read it in Sinhala, than in English.

In terms of my approach, I would say that when writing in Sinhala, I don’t think in English. When I write in English, however, I’ll sometimes think in Sinhala.