The 31st Gratiaen Prize - Longlist

Congratulations to all the writers!

A Passing Return - Pasan Jayasinghe
(travelogue - unpublished)

Pasan Jayasinghe is a researcher and writer from Colombo. He is currently completing a doctorate in political science at University College London. Pasan is a visiting lecturer at the University of Colombo, and has previously worked as a policy advisor, legal researcher and election monitor. His writing has appeared in a number of local and international publications, including Al Jazeera, The Hindu, Clash and Overland Magazine.

A Passing Return is a memoir about coming back to, and coming to terms with, Sri Lanka. I wrote it to document returning to the country after a long time away, and the new contours of it I discovered in the process—places, people and politics I was unfamiliar with and unprepared for. Structured as a series of essays and reflections, A Passing Return grapples with identity, time and memory, and asks if it’s possible to find resolution in a country that refuses it for anyone.

Crossing the Line - Jehan Aloysius
(play script - unpublished)

Jehan Aloysius is a full-time theatre practitioner who wears many hats as an actor, director, composer and choreographer. He is the founder of the amateur theatre troupe, CentreStage Productions, which celebrates 23 years of producing original Sri Lankan theatre this year. As a playwright, Jehan has been shortlisted three times for The Gratiaen Prize, for The Screaming Mind (2000), The Ritual (2008) and Mind Games (2020), and longlisted for Reality Show (2022). He was on the panel of judges of the 2014 Gratiaen Prize. Four of his plays were selected to represent Sri Lanka at Asia’s largest arts festival, the Bharat Rang Mahotsav, as well as the Theatre Olympics. Jehan’s humanitarian efforts, though his StageHands Project, include work with children affected by poverty, natural disaster and the war. He is also known for his physical theatre productions with those living with mental and physical disabilities.

Crossing the Line is a musical allegory, which I began writing in 2006 as a reaction to the horrors of the Sri Lankan conflict. The idea for the script came to me while working on post-tsunami humanitarian projects in various ‘un-cleared’ areas and border villages in the North of Sri Lanka. My research included transcriptions of interviews with ‘child-soldiers’. The fictional border village of Crossing the Line is intentionally painted in broad strokes, with larger than life characters that are intended to be of symbolic nature. 

Father Cabraal’s Recipe for Love Cake - Ramya Jirasinghe 
(novel - unpublished)

: In a tropical island fort built by a colonial trading company in the 18th century, a woman makes a cake as sweet as wild honey and as unforgettable as a great love. Yet, the events that have made her life in the fort possible are violent and unforgiving. During an insurgency, the past and the present interweave when a fugitive enters the woman’s house.

Footnotes of a Protest - E M Tennakoon
(poetry - published)

Tennakoon EM (Manjari) has a MA in English Literature and is a teacher of English by profession with two decades of experience. She also develops teaching and learning material as part of her current occupation and has had the opportunity to develop teaching resources for Pearson Edexcel’s international specifications for International GCSEs and A Levels in both English Language and English Literature.
Both as an educator and a writer, she believes in active engagement in the context she lives in and demonstrating through action the ideas she imparts in learning spaces. The poetry collection ‘Footnotes of a Protest’ is thus the result of active citizenship as well as of her professional and literary commitment.

Some days are best forgotten; and others worth remembering forever.
2022, was one such year and while the poetry that flows through these pages attempts to capture the emotions of living through upheaval; it is the timeline of events stamped on the edge of each page that binds us to the realities we experienced.
This collection that traces those events, even as it echoes the reactions, is an imperfect attempt to commit yesterday to memory before it is relegated to less than a footnote of a strangely perfect tomorrow

Gnanam - Selvi Sachithanandam 
(biography - published)

Selvi can be sensed as a seeker who strives to position self exploration and deep inner work at the root of all her multifaceted activities - both professional and otherwise. She navigates the worlds of being an architect/town planner, creative writer, Carnatic music singer, theatre actor and an explorative cook - all with a purpose of taking her to higher spiritual realms as espoused by some of the great sages.
A career in design as an Architect /Town Planner in London for 21 years evolved into being a Programmer at the United Nations (10 years) when she returned to Sri Lanka; This transpired during the war years with the purpose of alleviating the suffering of the war affected and displaced people. She went on to setting up Poornam Foundation which focused on raising of human consciousness through healing and meditative activities. Under her guidance, Poornam Foundation has also spearheaded and piloted the first Basic Income project in Sri Lanka which assisted beneficiaries in Kilinochchi and Colombo. Her passion for creative writing and documenting narratives has been a silent companion in her journey but never found expression for decades. Seeking fulfillment in her retired years she took to writing which culminated in her first book, Gnanam -Timeless Wisdom.

Gnanam is a biography cum memoirs, first crafted primarily to integrate the grief and to fill the void a matriarch's departure from this world left behind. The book charts the stories of 5 generations of women belonging to one family in Jaffna and it was inspired by the love, empathy, and trust that they handed down along the line.
The narrative, by unfolding in the backdrop of social, political and cultural history of the country in corresponding times, fills vast silences in our knowledge of our own history with the wealth of detail and insight which has been documented. We are informed of the old traditions in house keeping, cast infringements and nuances of gender relations. It also gives glimpses of the life of a Tamil civil servant in Sri Lanka, the rise and fall of the Samasamajists, the ‘58 riots, Black July 1983 and the end of the war in Mullivaikal in 2009.
The spiritual thread that runs through the book is innocuous, subtle and inaudible but profuse in its presence and draws a correlation between wisdom, health, spirituality and healing which is slowly finding traction in today's world.

Students and Rebels - Vihanga Perera
(novel - published)

Vihanga Perera is a poet and writer of fiction. His recent work includes Epistles, Elegies, Imitations and The Lavinia Poems / Aphrodite’s Child, both collections of poems. Spanning over two decades, his Bodies in Art is a biographical account of several Kandy and Colombo dramatists and poets. Perera is currently working on a new novel.

Students And Rebels is set in the months leading to the height of Sri Lanka’s political emergency in 1988 and 1989. It narrates how uncertainty and violence reached two villages in Kandy and the ways in which lives of ordinary people were caught in the crossfire. The story unfolds through five narratives told on hindsight by men and women who turn the clock back by thirty years to return to sites of trauma.

Thomia - Richard Simon
(history - unpublished)

Richard Simon attended S. Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia from 1966 until 1977 and later studied physics and musical acoustics at the University of Surry. As a writer and editor, he has worked in advertising, publishing and related fields both in Lanka and abroad. Among his published works are Ceylon Tea: The Trade That Made A Nation; Sri Lanka: The Island from Above; Legacy: John Keells and the History of Sri Lankan Business and Sri Lanka: The Resplendent Isle. His short fiction has been published by Penguin India and Himal Southasian. He is married and lives in Nawala with far too many cats and dogs.

A detailed history of S. Thomas’ College for general as well as specialist readers, Thomia focuses on the role of this elite boys’ school in the growth and development of modern Lanka. The story commences with the beginnings of public education in British Ceylon, c.1801, and ends with the sesquicentennial of the College two hundred years later. Extensively researched at home and abroad, it is unique in content and perspective and will appeal to anyone with an interest in Lanka’s history and social development.
Thomia tells many stories: about the ups and downs of politics, of changes in society, morals and fashion, of colonialism and decolonialization, communalism and patriotism, education and culture, religion and sectarianism, war and peace. These interwoven narratives enfold the history of S. Thomas’ itself – its fragile beginnings, the dangers that so often beset it, the lives of its inspired founder and its great wardens and teachers, the influence of its many famous alumni, its triumphs and its tragedies.

When Ghosts Die - Lal Medawattegedara
(novel - unpublished)

Lal Medawattegedara teaches English at the Open University of Sri Lanka and is the author of 4 books: Playing PIllow Politics at MGK (Novel; Winner Gratiaen 2012); Restless Rust (Novel; Shortlisted Gratiaen 2021), The Window Cleaner's Soul (Short Stories; Shortlisted Gratiaen 2002) and Can you hear me running (Short Stories).

"When determined dead spirits launch an agitation (called Maragalaya) to oust dead politicians from the nation's most exclusive cemetery, an urn, a teapot and an extraordinarily ordinary woman called Mandara gain unexpected significance. The urn (predictably) carries ashes, hijacked from the dead; and the teapot—shhhh! things that should not be uttered. The nation's patriotic politicians must stop this urn from reaching Piduruthalagala—will they? And the teapot must be snatched from Mandara now—can they? Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.”