Sri Lanka 2003

Abstract

Sri Lanka’s term as chair of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Eurasia ended in the year under review. The judges were Walter Perera, University of Peradeniya (chair); Sanjukta Dasgupta, University of Calcutta; and Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor of the Independent. Unlike the previous year, when all the events associated with the prize were held in Kandy, in 2003, readings by Commonwealth authors were held in Kandy while the announcement of the winners of the regional competition was made in Colombo. The announcement was preceded by a panel discussion on ‘The Role of the Commonwealth Writer in an Era of Globalisation’. Panellists included Boyd Tonkin, Neloufer de Mel, Sanjukta Dasgupta, and Rajiva Wijesinha. A unique feature of this CWP event was the participation of four High Commissioners from ‘Eurasia’ (the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, the Maldives) and the High Commissioner for Australia. Each representative was briefly interviewed by the Director of the British Council about the way in which their lives had been influenced by Commonwealth Writing. In announcing the winners of the year’s competition (Michael Frayn, the Best Book award, for Spies, and Sarah Hall, the Best First Book award, for Haweswater), the chair noted that ‘Commonwealth’ novels had become unrecognisable from what they were when the term was first employed in the 1960s. Some of the entries for 2003 showed authors of, say, American and Russian extraction writing on topics like the Vietnam war and the Chernobyl disaster, respectively. The ‘age of migration’ had indubitably led to a new heterogeneity and dynamism in the fiction produced in the Commonwealth. He concluded that if the object of literature according to the old adage was to ‘richly reveal the commonplace’, the task of reading close upon two hundred books over two years had shown the panels how Sri Lanka 2003