The 31st Gratiaen Prize - Shortlist

A Passing Return - Pasan Jayasinghe

A Passing Return is a memoir about coming back to, and coming to terms with, Sri Lanka. Pasan wrote it to document returning to the country after a long time away. 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.

Father Cabraal’s Recipe for Love Cake -

Ramya Jirasinghe

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.

Gnanam -

Selvi Sachithanandam

Gnanam is a biography cum memoir and 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.

The spiritual thread that runs through the book is innocuous, but profuse in its presence and draws a correlation between wisdom, health, spirituality and healing.

Students and Rebels - Vihanga Perera

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 .The story unfolds through five narratives told in hindsight by men and women who turn the clock back by thirty years to return to sites of trauma.

When Ghosts Die - 

Lal Medawattegedara

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 and the nation's patriotic politicians must stop this urn from reaching Piduruthalagala—will they? Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.  

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