33rd Gratiaen Prize - Report and Winner Citation
REPORT ON 33rd GRATIAEN PRIZE
It is our privilege to select the winner of this prize in a year when freedom is more important than ever, in Sri Lanka and around the world. As we announce our choice of winner, we want to call attention to the freedom to which readers and writers, including Sri Lankan readers and writers, are entitled. We note particularly the case of Tamil writer Theepachelvan, who recently had two books withheld by customs here, purportedly as the result of concerns that their release could “damage national harmony.” This comes as the most recent event in a country where writers have long been under threat. We think of Richard de Soyza, Rajani Thiranagama, Prageeth Eknaligoda, Lasantha Wickrematunge, Poddala Jayantha, DBS Jeyaraj, Chelvy Thiagarajah, Murukaiya Thamilselvan, Ahnaf Jazeem, Kanapathipillai Kumanan and many, many others from different communities who have been terrorized, suppressed, and silenced because they picked up a pen. We hold that national harmony is strengthened by rigorous, informed conversation and freedom of information and expression—which requires more and more outlets for imagination and thinking, not censorship. We believe that Sri Lanka is a country of diverse readers that deserve the best, meaning the greatest possible degree of exchange, as well as liberation of thoughts, ideas, and language. We support Theepachelvan’s freedom and the freedom of every writer who works in Sri Lanka, in any language. We support the freedom of Sri Lankan readers. In this spirit, and in solidarity with these communities, it was our honor to read this year’s submissions for the Gratiaen Prize, representing the best of literature in English by writers resident in Sri Lanka.
We judged the prize against the backdrop of a volatile global and national landscape, in which we navigate deep political and economic shifts defined by a hyper-connected, socially charged world. We engage with a globalized Sri Lanka that is renewing itself while grappling with societal fissures stemming from ethnic, class, and religious upheavals. In an era marked by increasing sites of cultural resistance—accelerated by fragmentation and the sprawling effects of an AI culture—our task was to recognize compelling literature. We sought writing that not only brought vitality into the Sri Lankan canon, but also carried a sense of timelessness.
We received a record-breaking number of submissions—close to a hundred. This would have been daunting regardless; it became even more so when we realised how truly excellent the entries were. Fiction, short stories, poetry, and memoir were well represented, along with voices across generations, identities, and positionalities based all over the country.
Constructing a unified criterion capable of distilling the absolute best from an already robust pool was an immense, challenging responsibility. Yet we aligned immediately and unanimously regarding what we sought in this year’s Gratiaen winner. We gravitated toward work driven by absolute purpose—writing that is inherently bold, curious, honest, and innovative. We sought writing that taught us to see the relationship between local and global anew, that did not overexplain or apologize, and that saw and celebrated Sri Lankan vernacular as well as the global aspects of Sri Lankanness. We thought about how literature centering overlooked parts of the island could interrogate its subject matter strictly on its own terms. We searched for work unafraid of engaging with the political and its relationship to the personal.
As Michael Ondaatje put it in at the 1993 inaugural presentation of the Gratiaen Prize, “Nothing is as exciting for us as to find our own place, or our own stories, in a book. When that happens the self is doubled, we are no longer invisible.” Staying true to the spirit of Ondaatje’s message, we prioritized writing that carves out spaces to illuminate marginalized experiences. Equally vital was our commitment to the raw authenticity of human expression. In an era of increasing technological uniformity, we sought to honor literature that centers human experience and voices rather than the synthetic touch of artificial intelligence.
This year’s winner, Visakesa Chandrasekaram’s The Son and the Lover, not only meets but actually exceeds our criterion. It is a brave novel of startling, intense emotion, a book that addresses its characters and Sri Lanka with deep love and rigor.
With a fearless and critical eye, The Son and the Lover navigates the polemic intersections of Buddhist ideology and the nature of the modern monastic order, unmasking undercurrents of racism, entitlement, and the preservation of stagnant practices that clash with the pulse of contemporary life. Through Hasi, a young Buddhist monk, we see a young man initially perceived as the two-dimensional caricature of a “saffron thug” emerge as a son and a lover embedded in a complex web of relations.
To forge his own identity, Hasi systematically rejects prescribed labels. He abandons his robes to forge a defiant future in Australia with his lover, Phil. In Sri Lankan culture, a Buddhist monk’s sexuality is a taboo subject. Queer desire within the monastic community is even more suppressed. These subjects could even be considered blasphemous. It requires, then, a writer with a special brand of courage to explore a Buddhist monk’s queer sexual orientation. The Son and the Lover brings to light a human experience that some have attempted to render illegible and illegitimate. Chandrasekaram charts the blooming intimacies between Hasi and Phil, the tremors that accompany Hasi’s international journey, intercultural tensions, and intergenerational rifts with deep care and depth. Hasi’s travels are characterized by a refreshing sense of worldliness; this global consciousness addresses age-old systemic problems in a way that ensures the novel’s broad and enduring relevance. Hasi stands as the heartbeat of this story—flawed, vulnerable, and a rebel. Correspondingly, the decay of relationships in the book is handled with masterful unpredictability; there are no tidy explanations, only the organic friction and psychological tension of characters refusing to play along with societal expectations.
Chandrasekaram does not play along with societal expectations either. Shattering the conventional narrative of escape, he defies the reductive trope of the South Asian homosexual exploiting the West to flee their home country. Chandrasekaram’s protagonist Hasi imagines a future in his village—a place stereotypically cast as the very space from which a gay man must escape. Chandrasekaram’s novel marks a second generation of gay Sri Lankan fiction, challenging, complementing, and becoming a worthy successor to Shyam Selvadurai’s landmark Funny Boy.
Beyond the intimate relationship it charts, Chandrasekaram’s The Son and the Lover builds well-rounded female characters. The novel constructs an intricate architecture of strong women who shape the trajectories of the men around them while systematically subverting the cliches of the subcontinental matriarch. Hasi’s mother, for instance, who initially appears to be a village woman, turns out to be more progressive and open-minded than stereotype dictates. Like Babanona and Sellamma in Chandrasekaram’s films Paangshu andMunnel, respectively, Hasi’s mother embodies an Indigenous set of epistemes which only a writer grounded in Lankan life and culture can effectively capture.
The Son and the Lover is a deep meditation on Buddhist notions of desire and renunciation and powerfully captures the nuances of mother-son relationships across cultures. In this sense, it expands Chandrasekaram’s artistic oeuvre by adding a new dimension to the mother-son relationships he has encapsulated in his film work, in particular, Paangshu and Munnel. He was already a trailblazing filmmaker; he directed the first film in Sri Lankan history on queer desire, Frangipani. The Son and the Lover extends Frangipani’s great ambitions and takes a Sri Lankan narrative to a global readership. The novel is saturated with a cinematic language which at times evokes the surreal imagery of David Lynch and other times the stylistic language of Satyajit Ray. The end transfixed us with a surprising twist that has a dash of magic realism. The reader comes out of the story a different person.
The timing of the novel as Sri Lanka grapples with monastic chaos and disorder is profoundly telling. It underscores creative writing’s power to reveal the controversial undercurrents of the times we live in, blurring the lines between political fact and artistic fiction. In the words of the late Qadri Ismail, The Son and the Lover is a novel that “abides by Sri Lanka,” that sees Sri Lanka “as simultaneously object (of knowledge) and subject (of intervention).” Without Orientalizing local life or pandering to Western audiences, Chandrasekaram tells a Sri Lankan story, one that deserves the world. Chandrasekaram has crafted a novel that stands as an undeniably original contribution to world literature—a necessary interrogation of what it means to live, love, and remain in Sri Lanka today.