The current decade has seen an extraordinary flourishing in Sri Lankan literature across communities and languages. Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won the Booker Prize in 2022, and V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night won the Carol Shields Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024. S.Shakthidharan’s multi-lingual play Counting and Cracking had a successful run at the Public Theater in New York in 2024. Meanwhile, translations of Sinhala and Tamil texts continue to become available in English. This efflorescence of Sri Lankan writing across Sinhala, Tamil, and English means that Sri Lankan literature has broader global visibility than at any point in its history, and it corresponds with a turbulent period in Sri Lankan history, including a watershed moment in 2009 when the civil war ended and the 2022 Aragalaya led to the collapse of the Rajapakse regime that had dominated Sri Lankan politics since 2006.
This panel is in conversation with recent special issues of South Asian Review edited by Jayasuriya and Karunanayake (2025) and Jayasuriya and Halpe (2012), Minoli Salgado’s Writing Sri Lanka (2006) and Witness Literature (2025), Nimanthi Rajasingham’s Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka's War (2019), and Jayasuriya’s Terror and Reconciliation (2012). Each of the four panelists will speak for 12 minutes to leave ample time for discussion. The diversity of voices is substantial: one graduate student, one assistant professor, and two senior scholars among the speakers. The speakers are domiciled in the US and Sri Lanka, and the panel includes both Sinhalese and Tamil participants.
Shermal Wijewardene explores Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) as a mock-serious quest for justice for war victims from 1980s Sri Lanka, wherein the goal is as much to discover what constitutes ‘justice’ as to achieve it. Wijewardene argues that the novel’s innovative representational strategies decenter the human as the subject of law and rights; encompass within the scope of transitional justice those not recognized as ‘human’, including nature, animals, and queer people; and highlight the structural conditions of injustice underlying conflict.
Nathan Omprasadham considers Shehan Karunatilaka's Chats with the Dead (2020) and its Booker Prize-winning revision The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) to establish a case study for Sri Lanka's emergence onto the world stage by the uneasy vector of international literary prizes. Omprasadham explores how Karunatilaka's revisions reflect a conscious effort to engage with a broader readership, while also examining how the novels offer insights into contemporary Sri Lanka, including the ongoing struggles for peacebuilding, the recent protests, and the ongoing economic crisis.
While Wijewardene and Omprasadham are concerned with Anglophone literature, Anushiya Ramaswamy discusses postwar literature in Tamil from her perspective as a translator as well as a literary critic using the Sri Lankan-born, France-based writer Shobasakthi’s 2019 Tamil novel Ichaa, the story of a failed suicide-bomber. Ramaswamy argues that in Ichaa, Shobasakthi points to the cycles of violence that have rocked Sri Lanka from the time of its independence, tracing violence to patriarchal ideologies that are foundational to the political imaginary.
Sandamini Ranwalage also deals with the connection of a postwar text to the history of war and ethnic discrimination in Sri Lanka, in this case via a multilingual theatrical production that has been staged in Australia and North America. Sri Lankan-Australian director and writer S.Shakthidharan deems his play Counting and Cracking (2019) a story of “a mother who finds on the other end of the phone line the husband that she thought was dead, alive.” Ranwalage examines how performed and performative distance makes the play an alternative historiographical project that is salient against the backdrop of Sri Lankan nationalist narratives of migration and diaspora by centering the corporeal and the profound lack thereof as inseparable from one’s relations to home.
The panel as a whole is shaped by the multi-lingual engagement with Sri Lanka’s past by authors over the last decade and by the question of how this past will shape a future that is contingent and unfolding.