A World of Books: Martin Wickramasinghe in Colombo

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for coming.

- UDITHA DEVAPRIYA

I want to begin with a quote.

"Reading books was his only way forward."

It has a wider relevance to today's presentation. I will return to it towards the end, and I will reveal who said it as well, but do bear it in mind until then.

I think Hirun Matheesha introduced me better than I ever could, though I suspect he was too kind and generous with the introduction. So, I will skip the icebreaker.

Martin Wickramasinghe was easily Sri Lanka's most well-known and prominent novelist and critic of the 20th century. In a career spanning 60 years - his first major work was published in 1914, his last in 1973he authored some 13 novels, a number of short story collections, and countless collections of essays on art, culture, history, literature, and politics. In terms of the themes he tackled in these works, he was a polymath. Though not an artist in the conventional sense of that word, he was a leading modernist in Sri Lanka and perhaps in South Asia, even if we often do not give him credit for this.

For obvious reasons, it is his fiction that has endeared him to the reading public in Sri Lanka. And why shouldn't it? After all, there is hardly a student or a university undergraduate who has not heard of Madol Doowa, the Koggala Trilogy, or even Viragaya. These are seminal works in the context of Sri Lankan and Sinhala literature, and they have been translated to several languages, including Hindi, Russian, and Chinese.