By Pawan Madri Kalugala “…any woman I lust for, as I lust for death.” — Lakdas Wikkramasinha, "The Muse". **** Lakdas Wikkramasinha’s poetry is one of dichotomies; of warring dualities, conflicting energies, and fierce tugs in opposite directions. An aspect that repeatedly stands out in his poems is the tug-of-war between opposing forces which birth... Continue Reading →
Weeraperuma’s Kelaart: A Different Lankan Gay Experience
By Vihanga Perera In queering their literature, Sri Lankan English Writers have habitually resorted to gay boys and men. From Arjun and Shehan in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1995), Kumaran and Naveen in Visakesa Chandrasekaram’s Tigers Don’t Confess (2011), Shehan (who is in love with Robbie, his Australian school mate) in Channa Wickremesekera’s Tracks (2015),... Continue Reading →
Social Concerns & Buddhist Reflections in Suvimalee Karunaratna’s “The Mandara Flower Salon”
By Subhagya Liyanage The Mandara Flower Salon and Other Stories (2004) - one of Suvimalee Karunaratna's last collections in a career in a four-decade long creative writing career before the writer took robes - explores some salient socio-cultural features of Sri Lanka through a host of characters from many walks of life. Accompanying this social... Continue Reading →
Some Defining Aspects of Palitha Ranatunge’s “My Epitaph for You”
By Vihanga Perera My Epitaph for You (2020) is Palitha Ranatunge’s third collection, after A Shifting in My Paradigm and The Crimson Sky, and arguably his best work to date. It consists of 41 poems of which the personal poems dominate the collection including a corpus notable for its expressions of anxiety, vulnerability, and moments... Continue Reading →
“Weaver At Her Loom”: A Satisfactory Collection
By Subhagya Liyanage Ransiri Menike Silva’s Weaver at her Loom is an engaging, masterfully narrated collection of short stories which was awarded the State Literary Award for that genre in 2007. Despite a couple of stories that seem insubstantial (particularly seeming so in a collection of only 10 narratives), many of the stories are creative... Continue Reading →
A Wild Man’s Encounter with Buddhism in “The Village in the Jungle”
By Vihanga Perera Of Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) biographer Victoria Glendinning states the following: “Though I do not altogether understand the import of the old Buddhist’s interventions towards the end [of the story], I can find no other technical glitch in the novel” (Glendinning 15). Glendinning’s reference is to the fleeting... Continue Reading →
The Classical Imprint in Aruni Walker’s Poems
The Classical Imprint in Aruni Walker's Poems in Odyssea. By Vihanga Perera Though it is almost a cliché for essayists to flag Patrick Fernando’s The Return of Ulysses (1955) as a case study in the use of the classical metaphor in local English poetry, such usage is by no means a dated practice. A survey... Continue Reading →
Rape of Adolescents in Chhimi Tenduf-La’s Fiction.
With a Tennis Ball in the Mouth: Rape of Adolescents in Chhimi Tenduf-La’s Fiction. Chhimi Tenduf-La’s novel Panther (2015) and short story “White Knight” (2017) intersect each other in their interest with the rape of adolescent children in the back-scenes of international schools by sports coaches they hire. The rape of Prabhu, the adolescent main... Continue Reading →
Ferrey: “The Ceaseless Chatter of Demons”.
A Spa-loving, Milk wine-supping Devil: Ashok Ferrey's The Ceaseless Chatter of Demons. Ashok Ferrey’s fifth novel, The Ceaseless Chatter of Demons (2016), is meant to be a humorous yet acute exploration of evil inherent in man. As if to prove the point, Ferrey delves into the realm of demons and actual witchcraft supposedly practiced in... Continue Reading →
“I believe that ethnic division is like a house division in schools and nothing more.” – Ayathurai Santhan.
Recent awardee of the Premchand Fellowship 2017 by the Sahithya Akademi of India, Jaffna-resident writer in Tamil and English Ayathurai Santhan shares a few ideas on literature, reconciliation and the way forward as a single country. He states that reports by some Southern media claiming terrorism is on a come back cannot be true and... Continue Reading →