- In conversation with Chiranthi Rajapakse and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
One of Sri Lankan English literature’s biggest events concluded last weekend with the announcement of the 2023 winners of the Gratiaen Prize and the winner of the H.A.I. Goonetileke Prize for Literary Translation.
This year, in reflection of the work put forward, two joint winners were announced for the Gratiaen Prize – Chiranthi Rajapakse for her collection of short stories ‘Keeping Time and Other Stories,’ and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne for his speculative fiction novel ‘The Wretched and the Damned’. Both authors put forward unpublished manuscripts.
Veteran academic and translator Manel Eriyagama won the H.A.I. Goonetileke Prize for Literary Translation for her collection of translated short stories ‘Jewels’.
30 years of the Gratiaen Prize
The Gratiaen Trust was established in 1992 by Michael Ondaatje with the proceeds of his Booker Prize win for his novel ‘The English Patient’. Over the years, the Gratiaen Trust, with the Gratiaen Prize and its many other initiatives, has become an institution for the English literature circle in Sri Lanka.
In her remarks at the event held to announce the winners of the 2023 Gratiaen Prize, Gratiaen Trust Chair Prof. Neloufer de Mel drew from Michael Ondaatje’s novel ‘In the Skin of the Lion’ to reflect on institution building and the journey of the trust these past 30 years, including how it has adapted to changes in the literary scene.
She thanked the past chairmen and trustees for steering the trust, John Keells Foundation – the Primary Sponsor of the trust for the past five years, the British Council that has been with the trust since its inception and now partners with the trust in a programme which brings UK-based writers to Sri Lanka for workshops and guest talks, the Marga Institute that provides secretarial services to the trust, and Wijeya Newspapers for media sponsorship.
Prof. de Mel further observed that despite the challenging economic environment, this sponsorship had enabled the trust to expand its activities considerably. This includes the Gratiaen Young Writers Club, open mic events, and undergraduate creative writing workshops to mentor young people in creative writing.
The 2023 winners
This year saw the announcement of two winners, a decision reached unanimously by the judging panel led by internationally-acclaimed award-winning author and Royal Society of Literature Fellow Romesh Gunesekera. The other jury members were psychotherapist and former Editor of the Oxford University Press, New Delhi Sukanya Wignaraja – an avid reader of literature – and University of Colombo Department of English Senior Lecturer Dr. Kaushalya Perera, whose research interests span linguistics and literature.
Speaking on appointing two winners, Gunesekera said of the decision: “It seems we had discovered a treasure chest, not a box of fruit. And the treasure was like a gold coin with two faces, each amazing in its own way. And so, in the spirit of the times, where we want to celebrate more than one story of our times, where one is not enough, we declare not one but two winners for the 2023 Gratiaen Prize; two winners that show the range of Sri Lankan writing in English. They show how you can write in Sri Lanka and about Sri Lanka in radically different ways.”
Following the announcement, The Sunday Morning Brunch reached out to both winners for a little more insight into their winning submissions and how they approached their craft as writers.
‘Keeping Time and Other Stories’
Chiranthi Rajapakse’s second completed literary work, ‘Keeping Time and Other Stories,’ is a collection of short stories that gives readers a glance of contemporary Sri Lankan life. Skilfully crafted, the stories capture the richness and depth of everyday lives and invite the reader to reflect on the complexities of deceptively ordinary experiences.
“They’re different stories on different themes that focus on different aspects of everyday life in contemporary Sri Lanka,” Rajapakse shared with Brunch, adding: “It’s not targeted specifically to any one set of audience but to the general reader and anyone who wants to read about what it’s like to live in Sri Lanka.”
Rajapakse’s other published work includes her collection of short stories ‘Names and Numbers’ published in 2017 which was also, at the time, shortlisted for the 2017 Gratiaen Prize.
Speaking on being a joint winner of the 2023 Gratiaen Prize, Rajapakse said: “I’m just very happy, really. It was very nice just to be shortlisted because even being shortlisted means your work gets recognition. Between poetry collections and science fiction, choosing the winners this year would have been a really hard task. It was also really nice to meet the other shortlisted winners.”
‘The Wretched and the Damned’
The judging panel described Wijeratne’s ‘The Wretched and the Damned’ as “a bold challenge and a book of the times, reflecting the upheavals of Sri Lanka’s immediate past and present. It brings a set of fantastic heroes to the Sri Lankan landscape, and deals with possible futures, impossible solutions, and urgently paced action.”
Speaking on his win, Wijeratne shared that he was very happy to be recognised by an institution like the Gratiaen Trust: “It is a great honour and it’s also nice to see speculative fanfiction getting recognised. Validation is important to writers and we have seen many of our leading English literary voices emerge from the ranks of the Gratiaen Prize.”
The profile of the Gratiaen Prize also inspires other would-be writers, with Wijeratne sharing that after being named to the longlist and shortlist as a writer in an unconventional genre, he did receive calls from other writers interested in the genre seeking advice on how to get published.
Wijeratne did note, however, that while celebrating the work of such institutions, it was important to remember that there were also lots of good writers outside these circles, who did not always get recognition from the public and it was important to recognise that English literature in Sri Lanka was very diverse and not limited to accolades like the Gratiaen Prize.
“‘The Wretched and the Damned’ is about a bunch of superpowered ‘antiheroes,’ if you will, engaging in an act of revolution. Something that quite often happens in Sri Lanka,” Wijeratne shared, noting that the novel dealt with cyclical themes Sri Lankans were all too familiar with – people trying to overthrow corrupt governments and setting themselves up as the best alternative; nepotism, corruption, current system structures and how they could be better (or worse).
Written in 2021, interestingly, ‘The Wretched and the Damned’ looks at a group of insurrectionists who start out by collapsing the economics of the country by starting protests, food riots, and many other things that did in fact come to pass in 2022.
Commenting on the somewhat prophetic nature of ‘The Wretched and the Damned,’ Wijeratne said: “I’m always mildly annoyed when it happens. I keep yelling at reality to stop telling my fiction and making me a journalist. That said, it is a bit scary when you say something like this and then realise the world is significantly worse than you thought or imagined it to be.”
Wijeratne described ‘The Wretched and the Damned’ as speculative fiction – fiction that takes an existing zeitgeist and throws it a bit into the future. ‘The Wretched and the Damned’ also builds in an element of superheroism, albeit not in the traditional clichéd Superman or Captain America trope. Wijeratne’s take on the superhero is more rooted in reality and on the premise that everyone’s gift is as much a curse as it is a boon.
“For example, someone who can heal – this would also be a curse, because healing is rapidly growing cells which can easily mutate into cancer. A star journalist whose power is deeply embedding themselves into someone’s life can transform into someone else and lose themselves.”
Creating a good book
Being a writer is very much a creative pursuit. What works for some writers will not work for others. Brunch asked Rajapakse and Wijeratne how they approached their respective writing processes.
For Rajapakse, writing is a lengthy process. With ‘Keeping Time and Other Stories,’ for example, some of the stories in the collection are stories she wrote four or five years ago, while others are about one to two years old.
Of her process, she said: “I need a quiet space to write. It can be different for other people, but I just need a quiet space to focus. I think everybody does, to get the words down on paper. I’ve been writing for a long time; all my life, really. I started out as a reader and wanted to write the kind of books that I would like to read. Writing is also a way of explaining things to myself and trying to make sense of things.”
On what challenges her most about writing, Rajapakse shared that her biggest challenge was something most writers faced – getting started. “Starting a new story is always a challenge. It’s easier when you’ve been writing for a while to get into the rhythm of it. What’s interesting about writing though is the process and finding your way through that gap of what you want to write and how the story works out differently than you imagine.”
Wijeratne also shared that part of his writing process was seeing how the story unfolded. “I fall midway between structured writing and seat-of-the-pants writing [writing without planning ahead or structuring a plot],” he said, adding that while he did usually envision a start, middle, and finish, that it did not bind him and often the ending could turn out very different from what he had initially envisioned.
Research forms the core of Wijeratne’s process. He shared that he often spent up to a year-and-a-half collecting information on a book like an intellectual magpie (he has had to switch to recording this information digitally because he frequently ended up running out of paper), seeing what ideas interested him and could work in a story.
Then he begins writing, hammering out about 10,000-15,000 words to see how the story flows and if it works. And, he stressed, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes it needs stronger characters or an additional thread running through that means it will not be able to develop for some time until the inspiration for that missing piece strikes.
Wijeratne is also a firm proponent of rewriting, sharing that he edited and rewrote his books sometimes up to four or five times to craft them just right to make the story and all its moving parts more impactful.
On becoming an author
Brunch concluded our chats with the winners by asking what they would say to aspiring authors.
Rajapakse explained that this was rather subjective. “I’m not very good at giving advice. And with advice, really all you can say is what you did. I’ve been writing a lot and reading a lot and I just keep going. It has a lot to do with endurance. Writing is a matter of keeping going sometimes – at least it is for fiction. You have to write something, some of which will be okay, and some of which won’t,” she said, adding that it was also important for writers to feel supported by those around them. “My parents and sister have been very supportive. I don’t come from a family of writers but they have always been very supportive of the strange things I like to do.”
Wijeratne’s advice to aspiring authors was constant vigilance – read a lot, write a lot, and try to read what other authors say about their process. “You might find tools you can add to your toolbox,” he said, stressing that this did not mean that it was wise to copy, but to look at the tools other writers used to tell stories and to communicate ideas and see if some of those tools were things you could use when it came to telling your own story.
“I would also say, try to find yourself an agent or publisher who will push you globally. In today’s age, a piece of literature is not just a local text anymore. Not just because of the internet but because the methodologies that shape us are now fundamentally hybrid. We are increasingly a melting pot of different influences, politics, thoughts, and ideas from all over the world depending on our social network. Build into that hybrid. Lean into it as much as possible.
Both ‘Keeping Time and Other Stories’ and ‘The Wretched and the Damned’ are as yet unpublished. The authors are currently looking for local publishers to bring their books to life and to the Sri Lankan people.
PHOTOS PRADEEP DAMBARAGE