Shehan Karunathilake is our first literary star

A store assistant displays a copy of the Britain’s Booker prize winning “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” novel at a bookshop in Colombo on October 18, 2022 (Photo by Ishara S. KODIKARA / AFP)

While Shehan’s  Booker award is groundbreaking and opens a new chapter for our literature, it could go the same way as post-1996 Lankan cricket unless writers do the hard work

Shehan Karunathilake’s Man Booker Prize (for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida) couldn’t have come at a better time. It’s a boon for Sri Lankan literature and the best thing that could happen to a country that is broke and lacking in self-esteem. 
Internationally, this will make people realise that a country which can produce writers of this calibre will have other hidden cultural assets, too, despite chaotic, deplorable politics.

Note that I didn’t say Lankan literature in English. This award will make readers and publishers abroad wonder if there aren’t other good writers working in indigenous languages, too. It’s a wakeup call to everyone that our literature has come of age.
Shehan is only the fourth Asian writer to be awarded the Booker. Arundhati Roy won it for her ‘God of Small Things’ in 1997, Kiran Desai in 2006 and Aravind Adiga in  2008. V. S. Naipual was born in Trinidad. He and Salman Rushdie were British citizens when they won the Booker.

This is the literary equivalent of Sri Lanka winning the cricket World Cup in 1996. At least one English radio station (Legends FM) mentioned the award prominently in its morning news broadcasts. Cricket news gets priority in news broadcasts in all three languages. Literary awards rarely get mentioned.
Before getting carried away, however, let’s not forget what happened to Sri Lankan cricket post-1996, and where it is today. Lankan cricket came of age after Minister Gamini Dissanayake invested large amounts of state funds to its development from the 1980s on.

Literature has no such patronage. It comes from the sweat of writers labouring alone. Cricket produces stars and public adulation. In other countries, there are literary stars. We have had none so far. Shehan Karunathilake is Sri Lanka’s first literary star.
Shehan, born in 1975, comes from a generation that swam against the current. Post-1978, ‘visionary’ president J. R. Jayewardhane had the greatest contempt for the literature and arts, following the technocratic Singaporean model, and even abolished literature from school syllabuses. It’s the writers – including poets, dramatists, script writers, and journalists – who kept literature alive against the odds in money-worshipping Sri Lanka.

Unfortunately, literary awards too are judged according to the amount of prize money  and the ensuing publicity varies accordingly. The Man Booker awards fifty thousand British pounds to the winner. The Commonwealth Prize is another prestigious literary award, but its book prize which offered 10,000 pounds has been discontinued, and the short story prize offers 1000 pounds to regional winners and 5000 pounds to the overall winner. Kanya D’Almeida, A Sri Lankan writer, won the Commonwealth overall prize for best short story in 2021, but that didn’t get  much publicity. Another Sri Lankan has won this prize earlier, but I couldn’t even find the name after a Google search. Does anyone remember?

While Shehan’s  Booker award is groundbreaking and opens a new chapter for our literature, it could go the same way as post-1996 Lankan cricket unless writers do the hard work. This event should inspire them to write more, and international publishers should take our writing more seriously.
A few years ago, I remember Dr. Sasanka Perera comparing our literature in English to the work of writers such as Salman Rushdie. He found our writing (the language) to be wanting in comparison.

When Arundhati Roy was awarded the Booker, critics said her language was a key deciding factor. However, many of the paperback novels from the West I’ve read, contemporary or mid-to late 20th century, are written in very ordinary language.  Alice Munro, Doris Lessing or Toni Morrison – all Nobel Prize winners – wrote their fiction in very simple, clear language. Even V. S. Naipaul, whom author V. S. Prichett called ‘best living writer in English,’ does not compare in prose style to Salman Rushdie. But all these writers are able to build up atmosphere, ambiance and tension with very simple language.

My point is that critics and Western publishers  should not look for language wizardry as a criteria. To be so selective amounts to hypocrisy when they publish hundreds or thousands of novels each year by new or established authors with no extraordinary language skills -- good stories written in ordinary language.
When I say the onus for carrying our literature in all three languages forward from this point falls on writers, one must keep in mind how hard it is to keep writing book after book while struggling to maintain family or oneself in a third world setting. Living inside today’s socio-economic and political nightmare that is Sri Lanka, it’s going to be very, very hard.

Many, if not most, writers I know of (in all three languages) are struggling, working at low-paid jobs or without permanent jobs. Writing a novel is hard labour. Our publishers have one-to-one personal relationships with writers, with no advances given when a book is accepted for publication. Money is given according to sales, but many writers earn very little or nothing.
This is where prize money is so important. Michael Oondatje, the first Lankan writer to gain international fame, very generously created the Gratiaen Prize for English writing. The initial prize money of Rs.100,000 has now been doubled, but this is meant for publication of the winning book, and may not be sufficient after this year’s economic meltdown. The corporate sector should step forward and increase the prize money as a logical follow up to Shehan winning the Booker. Shehan Karunathilake too, is a Gratiaen award winner.

Swarna Pustaka, the Sinhala equivalent of the Gratiaen, offers a substantial Rs. 800, 000. Winners say their books sell 15-20,000 copies after winning the award.
But their next book may not sell just as well. This is where the reading public needs to be supportive. The thirst for award-winning novels is a misleading approach to good literature. It’s a flash in the pan.
If the Booker is the Kilimanjaro of literature, the Nobel happens to be the Everest. The road is now clear for a Lankan author to win the Nobel in future. But let’s keep a sobering fact in mind.

Some of the best writers of the 20th century have not been awarded the Nobel. Leo Tolstoi, James Joyce, Franz Kafka Anna Akhmatova and D. H. Lawrence come to mind. There are many good writers out there one has never heard of because they haven’t won awards. Others get turned down by publishers because the latter worry about sales more than content.
This is where a prestigious award is of value. But my advice to writers is that, if you decide to take the long hard road of writing literature (as opposed to commercial fiction), forget awards and keep writing. If they come, that’s great. If not, you still have a life. There are thousands of good writers out there, all over the world, who do not win awards and get turned down by publishers.

‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,’ a thinly fictionalized  biographical account by American philosopher Robert M. Pirsig, was turned down by more than 150 publishers before it got printed and became a bestseller. J.K. Rowling was turned down by 90 publishers before her Harry Potter was finally accepted by one.

This is why many writers abroad have given up on traditional publishing and turned to Amazon books. But with Amazon, you have to do your own publicity. Also, Sri Lankan writers can’t deal directly with Amazon as there is no payment platform – they must find an outside source. We are facing many obstacles when trying to disseminate our literature abroad.
There are many writers who haven’t had a best seller but keep on writing tenaciously. That’s what makes up a literature. Western publishers and agents are hypocritical on this score. They say they are on the lookout for the ‘exceptional voice’ (whatever that means) but turn down good writing and go for the blatantly commercial. That’s where the money is.

This is where a prize such as the Booker or the Commonwealth Prize is important. Publishers can’t ignore you, and readers line up to buy the book. But you don’t win awards every day. Literature needs commitment, self-sacrifice, and people don’t understand why you spend your life doing something which brings neither fame nor money. Someone like Shehan Karunathilake is the exception that proves the rule.
Without these silently labouring dark horses, no country would produce a sustainable and lasting literature.

We have many writers labouring in the dark, in all three languages. Shehan’s Booker award shows them a light at the end of the tunnel – not because they must now focus on winning the Booker. It’s because at least some parents will wake up to the fact that writing books too, is something worthy of their children, not just cricket or becoming doctors or App designers. That will give us more good writers in future and, inevitably, more readers. Even the Rajapakse clan must now be wondering how it is possible to make so much money writing a book.
Also, it’s misleading to think that one has to write in English to achieve international fame. Authors writing in languages such as Arabic, Russian or Yiddish have won it because their books were translated into English. Our problem is to find good translators and this is where the universities can step in, by funding translation from Sinhala and Tamil to English.
While the Booker Prize is given only to books published in the UK and Ireland, A sister prize, the International Booker Translation Prize, is awarded for a book translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The £50,000 prize money is split evenly between the author and translator of the winning novel.