Longlist for The Gratiaen Prize 2021
A Place Called Home - Uvini Atukorala
All of the Oranges - Marianne David
The Unmarriageable Man - Ashok Ferrey
The Birth Lottery - Shehan Karunatilaka
The Lankan Box - Ciara Mandulee Mendis
Talking to the Sky - Rizvina Morseth de Alwis
Pictures I Couldn’t Take - Vivimarie Vanderpoorten
Read more below
A Place Called Home – Uvini Atukorala [unpublished manuscript]
These stories are quintessentially Sri Lankan, explore Sri Lankan identity, and what it means to belong. They feature Sri Lankans of diverse ages, occupations, ethnicities and religions living within the country and at times outside of it, and examine what it takes to call a place home.
All of the Oranges – Marianne David [unpublished manuscript]
This collection of poems moves through all the stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. What is grief really, when we unwrap it, but love? And what is love, if not a garment covering our nakedness, stitched through with loss, fear, remorse, and intertwined threads of hope? All these emotions are offered in the form of poetry here.
The Unmarriageable Man – Ashok Ferrey [published novel]
A woman in full-length mink sweeps up to Sanjay de Silva and scribbles her number on a piece of paper. 'Call me,' she says. She doesn't bother to ask his name. This is a novel about young Sri Lankans in London - but at its heart is the subject of grief: how each of us copes in our own inimitable way; how in the end you find that grief is only the transmutation of love, of the very same chemical composition - liquid, undistilled - the one inevitably turning to the other like ice to water.
The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises – Shehan Karunatilaka [unpublished manuscript]
An anthology of twisted tales about Sri Lanka’ many pasts and its possible futures, the stories feature an eclectic cast of Sri Lankan rock stars, robots, colonials, soldiers, housemaids, corporates, lovers, gangsters, presidents, prisoners, cannibals and time travellers. Each story aims to entertain and surprise, mixing absurdity with pathos, while playing with genre, voice and reader expectations. The collection will be published by Hachette, India and Little, Brown UK in 2022/23.
The Lanka Box – Ciara Mandulee Mendis [Unpublished manuscript]
The Lanka Box is a collection of short stories about the power of human connections and collisions – collisions that burst into burning fragments of pain and explode into a million beautiful hues. Here are the voices of the people you have already met and smiled with, but whose stories you thought you would never hear - the friend of the activist, the hapless charlatan on an estate, and the smiling monk in the train. This is the story of mediating life in a postcolonial, postwar Sri Lanka.
Talking to the Sky - Rizvina Morseth de Alwis [unpublished manuscript]
Set in contemporary Sri Lanka, Talking to the Sky tells the story of a Muslim family caught between modernity and rising conservatism against the backdrop of growing anti-Muslim sentiment and the fragmentation of a community leaning heavily towards Wahhabism. As the country reels from the shock of the Easter attack, Aisha learns that her son Aqib is missing, setting in motion a firestorm of gossip and speculation. As the once estranged family comes together to look for him, Aisha and her daughter Emaan also undertake a journey examining their faith, family, and love.
Pictures I Couldn’t Take - Vivimarie Vanderpoorten [unpublished manuscript]
A collection of poems that captures fleeting moments, thoughts, visions, sounds and insights: those moments you want to hold on to, but cannot, because they hold in them the balance between pain and pleasure, gain and loss, praise and blame, and fame and disrepute. With irony and compassion, the poems weave in and out of the spaces between love and its ending, war and its end, need, hunger, attachment and letting go.