Romesh Gunesekera

Romesh Gunesekera is a Sri Lankan British writer best known for his short stories and novels. Born in Colombo in 1954, he spent his childhood and adolescence in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and the Philippines, before moving to Britain in 1971. He studied philosophy at the University of Liverpool.

Gunesekera came to prominence in the 1980s as a writer of short stories, which were published in Stand magazine, London Magazine and Granta. He also wrote poetry, published in the London Review of Books, Poetry Durham and other magazines. He has been regularly featured in Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing. His first collection of short stories, Monkfish Moon, was published in 1992 by Granta and featured as a New York Times Notable Book of 1993.

In 1994 his debut novel, Reef, was short-listed for the Booker Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize and won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award in 1995. In 1998 he published The Sandglass, for which he won the BBC Asia Award for Achievement in Writing and Literature. In 2002 he switched publishers and his next novels, Heaven’s Edge (2002), The Match (2006), The Prisoner of Paradise (2012) and Suncatcher (2019), shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize, were published by Bloomsbury. He published Noontide Toll, a series of interlinked short stories focused on the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s civil war and the 2004 tsunami, with Granta in 2014.

He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004 and served on its Council from 2009 to 2013. He has judged several literary prizes, including the Caine Prize for African Writing, David Cohen Literature Prize, Forward Prize for Poetry, Commonwealth Short Story Prize, International Booker Prize and Wasafiri Queen Mary New Writing Prize.