I found it primarily interesting because I had not read a story about a Sri Lankan ex-pat living first in the Philippines and then in London, but that is Sunny's story, and this novel is all about that story. I picked this book up at a hotel in Trieste where a previous guest had left it and I decided to read it. He has been a Guest Director at the Cheltenham Festival, an Associate Tutor at Goldsmiths College and on the Board of the Arvon Foundation for writing. He has been a judge for a number of literary prizes including the Caine Prize for African Writing, the David Cohen Literature Prize and the Forward Prize for Poetry. Romesh Gunesekera is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has also received a National Honour in Sri Lanka. His other books are Noontide Toll, a collection of linked stories, and the historical novel The Prisoner of Paradise. In 2008, a collection of his Madeira stories were published in a bilingual edition to celebrate its 500th anniversary of the founding of Funchal in Madeira. His third novel, Heaven’s Edge, a dystopian novel set in the near future was published by Bloomsbury in 2002.įour years later Bloomsbury also published The Match hailed as one of the first novels in which cricket was celebrated, and a forerunner of the many cricket-related novels that have followed. In 1995 he won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award in Britain.

The previous year he was awarded one of the prestigious Italian literary prizes: the Premio Mondello Five Continents. In 1998, he received the inaugural BBC Asia Award for Achievement in Writing & Literature for his novel The Sandglass.

It was shortlisted for several prizes and named a New York Times Notable Book for 1993. In the USA he was nominated for a New Voice Award.īefore that, in 1992 his first collection of stories, Monkfish Moon, was one of the first titles in Granta’s venture into book publishing.

His first novel, Reef, was published in 1994 and was short-listed as a finalist for the Booker Prize, as well as for the Guardian Fiction Prize. In 2010 he was writer in residence at Somerset House. Before coming to Britain he also lived in the Philippines. Romesh Gunesekera was born in Sri Lanka where he spent his early years.

The reef romesh gunesekera