LIKE A WRITER POSSESSED

In both his Bookernominated novel and new collection of short stories, Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka justifies the superlatives his readers use to describe his work

- Aditya Mani Jha

ome October 12, Shehan Karunatilaka could become the f irst-ever Sri Lankan writer to win the Booker Prize; his novel Chats with the Dead (published in the UK as The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida) is on the shortlist. His 2010 novel Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, is frequently hailed as one of the great novels of the 21st century, and arguably the single greatest work of fiction involving cricket. And like the titular spin bowler of that novel unveils (as commentators are fond of saying) his “full bag of tricks”, so too does Karunatilaka with his latest—a collection of short fiction called The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises.

In the recently released Birth Lottery, stories of 15-20 pages are sandwiched between ‘short shorts’ of no more than one or two pages. During an interview, Karunatilaka spoke about how he started writing these stories (the oldest was written in 2001): “When I was procrastinating on writing my novel, I would write these longer short stories—two or three a year—as writing exercises. And when I was procrastinating on the longer stories, I would write the really short ones. While putting the collection together, it felt like putting a prog-rock album together, almost, and so I tried to balance the moods.” If Karunatilaka saw that he had an experimental story, he would follow it up with something much more traditionally structured.