32nd Gratiaen Prize - Report and Winner Citation

REPORT ON 32nd GRATIAEN PRIZE
by Gregory Pardlo

If he were with us, most likely, Harshana Rambukwella would be mortified to find himself the
center of so much attention and praise. Of course, he would have no one to blame but himself.
One person cannot have had such an outsized impact on the creative and intellectual lives of
the people around him and expect to escape the spotlight. Had Harshana not been taken from
us so suddenly and so soon, I might be politely sparing in my adulation, but in my grief, I am
emboldened to lay it on thick. The thing is, I would not have had the honor of serving on this
esteemed jury had it not been for Harshana. To be clear, I would have accepted his invitation
even without Harshana’s gentle coercion. I valued the assignment as much as I valued his
friendship.

Since then, Savithri, Crystal and I have read 82 manuscripts together. The books we read reflect
a range of styles, of course, but they also reflect a range of temperaments and sensibilities. We
encountered books driven as much by whimsy and play as they were compelled by moral and
political imperatives. We read books that explored themes far beyond the precincts of popular
culture as well as books that appeared to say nothing controversial on the surface while they
quietly plumbed the language with astonishing lyricism to evoke timeless truths.

Like any reader, the judges of literary prizes must strive to meet each text on its own terms, and
be open to new perceptions of rigor and excellence. Not surprisingly, some of the material was
beyond my cultural knowledge. Crystal and Savithri were mercifully patient in excavating the
more local nuances that escaped my scrutiny and that, once revealed, enriched my
appreciation of the work exponentially. Those conversations helped me grow as a thinker and
as a reader.

Those conversations also led to deep reflections on the nature of the prize and the role of
literature altogether. As chair of the jury, I acknowledge that we are for the moment
gatekeepers invested with a tremendous responsibility. As fair-minded gatekeepers, I want to
be as transparent as possible about the values that we contribute to the larger conversation
that includes and surrounds Sri Lankan literature. I do not suggest that these are universal
values to which every writer should adhere (more on this shortly), but I do suggest that they are
deeply considered and informed by long study and love for literature. Prizes rotate judges to
make sure the prize’s imprimatur does not harden into a single aesthetic mold. The prize exists
to amplify the conversation and to make sure the literary tradition itself does not stagnate.

We knew going in that we would need a kind of North Star that might keep us collectively on
course without predetermining our destination. How might we balance tradition in Sri Lankan
literature while championing novelty, innovation, and risk—qualities that challenge our
understanding of what a tradition should be and do? Our solution was to look for books that
seemed to build these questions into their conceptual foundations. To put it differently, we
looked for books that embraced the complexity of our historical moment with wit, intelligence,
compassion and, above all, imagination.

The work should have a sense of occasion, a sense that it is relevant to the moment. Certainly,
as writers we aspire to timelessness, but we must find our enduring themes in the debris of
history as it piles up at our feet. A text should also have purpose, which is not to say that it
should have an agenda, necessarily. Rather, it should wrestle with the so what factor that
haunts any work of the imagination. No text can definitively answer its own so what, but the
pressure of subjecting the text to questions about its relevance to a reader’s experience helps
curb gratuitousness and self-indulgence.

English as a common language can provide access to certain resources, but it can also mute, if
note erase, cultural distinctions. Given the diversity of Englishes and creoles in the world, we
decided that, rather than reward books based on their fidelity to colonial usage, we would
measure each text on the consistency and coherence of its own cultural logic, and on its ability
to teach the reader how that logic applies. “Craft” does not boil down to a writer’s ability to
catch typos, but to their willful control of material effects—the mechanics, if you will—to
orchestrate a reader’s movement through the text. This, again, is not to say that the reader
plays a passive role. Reading, like empathy, is not a spectator sport.

We live in interesting times. The religious far right in my country has declared empathy a sin.
Free speech is cast as hate speech, and the most privileged claim to be victimized by the most
marginalized. Book bans and tech bros would have us believe the death of imagination is a sign
of progress. Artificial intelligence is inescapably entwined in our daily lives. Rather than trying to
police it as if in defense of literary virtue, we considered AI as a useful counterpoint. Where AI
has no ethical stake in what it spits out, the authors we were drawn to demonstrate concern for
the world, however ambivalent that concern may be. It was important for us to consider the
ways in which authors communicated their investment in the future on any level: familial,
national or planetary.

Most of all, we looked for writing that had a singular voice. We read a number of manuscripts in
which the writers’ voices were practically indistinguishable from one another. While good
writing often strikes a note that resonates throughout the culture, aspirations toward
universality, I believe, are best reserved for advertising campaigns. A unique voice makes an
indelible impression because it stands apart. Admittedly, it is difficult to “sound like yourself”
because that is a voice that, until it is firmly established, does not exist anywhere outside of the
writer’s head. A writer develops their voice through increased awareness of the quirks,
idiosyncrasies and habits of mind that result from a lifetime of uniquely processed experiences.

While academically, we are taught that idiosyncrasies are flaws, in the creative realm, these are
often assets. The mature writer capitalizes on them and moves the language in new directions
as a result. In Savin Edirisinghe’s Kata Kathā: Gossips, Rumours & Idle Talk, we found a young
writer in pursuit of his own North Star, and we were eager to follow.

Savin Edirisinghe’s Kata Katha invites us to an intimate exchange of far more than words on a
page. “I was not woven with some kind of magical needle, nor was I the heir to a garment with
ancient Ceylon magic.” The opening sentence of Katha Kata all at once plunges us into a world
that is specifically located, approachably vernacular, contentious, and, despite its disclaimers,
wholly magical. These short stories draw upon the conflicts—however petty, however
epic—that shape our daily lives. A morning commute, an overheard phone conversation, the
most ordinary event might frame an absurdist rendering of social disfunction or a surrealist
send-up of structural oppression. These dramas masquerade as idle talk while they lampoon
our most self-defeating hypocrisies and social biases. Just as gossip is communal, we are all
complicit in the critique. Beginning in whimsy only to end in outrage, Edirisinghe’s prose can be
as blunt as it is surgical. Kata Katha is a collection of witty, bold, and experimental short stories
which rests on the premise that “Kata Katha” or “gossip”, a form of oral knowledge system, “is
the cornerstone of civilization”. The stories in this collection meander through the absurd, the
magical, and the irrational, offering readers a cast of young characters from varying walks of life
through an ingenious lens and narrative that deftly balances tragedy with satire.