Shyam Selvadurai: Sri Lankan-Canadian

Sri Lanka Dept: Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai has managed to avoid such pitfalls. His work confronts the open wounds of Sri Lanka civil war and his stripped-down prose focuses on the deeply personal with precision and insight. That not to say his novels are small. Funny Boy , his first, sets a young boy sexual coming-out in the years leading to Black July. Cinnamon Gardens takes place during Sri Lanka nascent independence movement, according to Globe and Mail. The protagonists of immigrant novels are often peripatetic, dispossessed and disoriented. They neither belong in the new world nor can they return to the homeland. Certainly, that the case for Shivan, the protagonist of The Hungry Ghosts and But the novel also demands inventiveness in structure and language, and usually the ability to limit scope to that of a singular consciousness. The trap for the Sri Lankan novelist is the distinct possibility of trivializing the contemporary conflict either by failing to capture the depth and multiplicity of viewpoints or by shrouding the visceral grief, rage and loss of war in lyricism and the artifice of plot and story. Selvadurai latest novel, The Hungry Ghosts , focuses on the most violent period of the conflict. In his career, he has expertly manipulated literary genre the coming-of-age tale, the historical novel and, now, the immigrant novel to constrain and to channel his characters, plots and themes. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.