The Unmarriageable Man - Citation

We have, as the winner of Gratiaen Prize 2021, a novel that displays the advanced craft of a writer working at his peak.  It’s a craft that has allowed for a writing style and tone that is supple enough to encompass both the comic and the tragic, as well as pathos and irony.  Working with a vast array of characters that hail from two cultural contexts—Sri Lankan and British—the writer shows a remarkable ability to inhabit characters of various ethnic and cultural identities with an authenticity and liveliness that makes them memorable characters that linger in the mind long after one has closed the pages of the book. 

In the novel, one sees a sophisticated and skillful handling of the various plot lines, which are all well worked out and dramatically compelling in their tension, without at the same time being over-determined, resulting in an open-ended quality that leaves room for the reader, once they have finished reading the novel, to imagine the ongoing lives of the character they have met and lived with in the novel.  Of particular note was the seamless incorporation of other-worldly elements into the novel, making them feel as real as the everyday realism in the story.  The father’s ghost was particularly powerful and poignantly captured, and the way this ghost has been woven into the story feels markedly Sri Lankan, drawing upon the Sri Lankan idea of fluid boundaries between this world and the next.  The vivid manner in which various and contrasting moments of the father-son relationship have been depicted throughout the novel speaks volumes to the writer’s ability to go deep into the psyche of the characters that he constructs.  Through the depiction of a Sri Lankan father who, after his death, presents himself to his son, that too in England, the writer imagines the father-son relationship at a whole new level. 

It is with absolute pleasure that we declare An Unmarriageable Man by Ashok Ferry the winner of the Gratiaen Prize 2021.  

The Jury, Gratiaen Prize 2021