Anuk Arudpragasam

The novel, written between 2011 and 2014, describes a day and a night in the lives of two young Tamils, Dinesh and Ganga, who are forced into a marriage as the Sri Lankan army intensifies its bombardment of the camp on the north-eastern coast where they are taking refuge. "I grew up in the south of Sri Lanka in a well-off family, as insulated as someone could be from the war," Arudpragasam told Guernica magazine. "It was an attempt to cross certain kinds of differences in experience between myself and these many other people in the north of the country who I had become separated from."[9]

A review in The New York Times commended the novel for "giving the innocents a place in history" and making readers "kneel before the elegance of the human spirit".[10] The Wall Street Journal celebrated it as a "small work of art whittled from atrocity."[11] Novelist Colm Toibin praised Arudpragasam's dense and attentive style: "Every image in the book, including the most desolate, is rendered with precision and an aura of pure truth and tenderness."[12] The book was listed as one of the best novels of 2016 by The Wall Street Journal,[13] NPR,[14] and the Financial Times.[15] It won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award,[16] and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize[1] and the Internationaler Literaturpreis.

Arudpragasam's second novel, A Passage North (Granta Books), was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.[17] The novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of the devastation of Sri Lanka's 30-year civil war. He says "'A Passage North is more about witnessing violence from afar than it is about experiencing it up close," which is closer to his own experience of the Sri Lankan civil war.[5]

Arudpragasam is currently working on a third novel "about mothers and daughters in the Tamil diaspora, set partly in New York and partly in Toronto."[5]