Shyam Selvadurai in conversation with Smriti Daniel

It’s been a busy year for Shyam Selvadurai. The author of Funny Boy, Cinnamon Gardens and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea is close to completing work on a new novel.

It’s also his second year as the curator of the Galle Literary Festival.

Amidst his busy schedule, the British Council has invited Shyam (and he has kindly accepted) to read from his books and talk about his work and the art of writing with writer and journalist Smriti Daniel.  

This event is presented as a part of the British Council’s Book Buzz series which was initiated with the objective of offering its audiences the opportunity of experiencing some of the best UK and Sri Lankan literary talent there is on offer.

Shyam Selvadurai was born in Colombo and spent much of his adolescence in Sri Lanka. In 1983, his family moved to Canada, where he studied creative and professional writing as part of a B.F.A.programme at York University.

His debut novel ‘Funny Boy’ (1994) was received well by critics and audiences both in Sri Lanka and abroad and is considered one of the novels that pioneered a new era of contemporary Sri Lankan writing in English. It was awarded the W. H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Men’s Fiction.

His second novel, ‘Cinnamon Gardens,’ was published in 1998 and his third novel, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (2005) – for young adults – is set against the backdrop of Othello, and tells the story of one boy’s infatuation with his Canadian cousin.

It was a finalist for Canada’s most prestigious literary award, the Governor General’s Awards, in the category of children’s literature and won a Lambda Literary Award in the same category.

His books have been published in the US, UK and India, and published in translation in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey and Israel. He teaches at York University and lives in Toronto.

He’s currently the curator of the Galle Literary Festival.

Smriti Daniel has made a career out of talking to strangers. Over the course of nearly a decade as a feature writer for The Sunday Times in Sri Lanka, she’s met many extraordinary people, a number of whom were writers.

An Indian national, Smriti has a Bachelor’s Degree in Mass Communication, English Literature and Psychology, a Masters Degree in English Literature and a diploma in Peace and Development Reporting. She was the managing editor of the trilingual children’s magazine ‘Yuti’ and is also a contributing writer to the leading Indian business newspaper Mint.   She made her film debut in Oscar winning director Gerardine Wurzburg’s documentary Wretches and Jabberers, for which she interviewed two autistic men on a road trip around the world.

Smriti is the author of a collection The Guava Tree and Other Poems.