ROMESH GUNESEKERA

LET’S TALK ABOUT ... Romesh Gunesekera

ROMESH GUNESEKERA, the author of Reef (Granta, 1994) and Monkfish Moon (Granta, 1992), will be in Kuala Lumpur from November 21-25, 2005, where he will participate in a conference on “Worlds in Discourse” organised by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and conduct creative writing workshops. Gunesekera will be reading from a selection of his works at Silverfish Books, Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur, on November 24, 2005, at 7:00p.m. Malaysian bookshops would do well to be more responsive to such literary events and stock up on the books of authors making stopovers in the city.

Bloomsbury will be publishing Romesh Gunesekera’s new novel, The Match, on March 6, 2006. You will most probably have enjoyed the Colombo-born novelist’s last two novels, Heaven’s Edge (Bloomsbury, 2002) and The Sandglass (Granta, 1998); a novella, Reef (Granta, 1994), winner of the 1994 Yorkshire Post Award for Best First Work and shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize for Fiction and the 1994 Guardian Fiction Prize; as well as a collection of stories, Monkfish Moon (Granta, 1992), which was shortlisted for the 1993 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Read what the acclaimed novelist has to say about why he writes: “The world being what it is, I write to redress the balance, at least in my own mind. I want to keep an inner life alive and, with luck, somebody else’s too. Imaginative writing, to me, is a way of discovering who we are, and what we have to contend with; discovering what is out there, and also what is not there. It enables me to think and explore and make something new with language, while trying to make sense of our lives.”

Bibliography
GUNESEKERA Romesh [1954-] Novelist, short-story writer, poet. Born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. NOVELS The Match (2006); Heaven’s Edge (2002); The Sandglass (1998) NOVELLA Reef (1994: winner of the 1994 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and the Italian Premio Mondello; shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize for Fiction and the 1994 Guardian Fiction Prize) STORIES Monkfish Moon (1992: shortlisted for the 1993 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Fiction)

Recommended
Novella: Reef (1994)
Stories: Monkfish Moon (1992)