Review of Andrew Fidel Fernando’s debut book Upon a Sleepless Isle, which has just won Sri Lanka’s Gratiaen Prize (2019) for English-language literature. — For The Critic
Filed in Journalism, review
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Also tagged Andrew Fidel Fernando, Anuradhapura, beards, beer, Booker Prize, children, Colombo, colonialism, cricket, elephants, English, ESPNCricinfo, Gratiaen Prize, humour, Jaffna, John Still, Kandy, LTTE, Michael Ondaatje, Minneriya, New Zealand, Nuwara Eliya, Picador India, Polonnaruwa, Shehan Karunatilaka, Sigiriya, tea, the British, The Critic, the Victorians, tourism, travel, tuktuks, Uva Rebellion, writers
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The Sri Lankan writer and photographer talks about the greatest photo he never got… and one he did. — For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times
Filed in column, interview, Journalism
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Also tagged Buddhism, China, clothing, David Blacker, demons, Interview, Kandy, light, monks, New York Times, novels, photography, Ritigala, Sinhala, Sunday Times (SL), Sweden, terrorism, travel, veddahs, war
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Sri Lanka’s pre-eminent photographer talks about the greatest photo that he never took… and one he did. — For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times
Filed in column, interview, Journalism
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Also tagged air travel, Anagarika Dharmapala, AsiaWeek, Barefoot, BBC, Ceylon, Der Spiegel, Dominic Sansoni, driving, Geoffrey Bawa, Jamie Foxx, movies, photography, portraiture, postcards, Richard Simon, roads, Robert Knox, roti, Sebastian Posingis, Sunday Times (SL), Thames & Hudson, the Maldives, The One That Got Away, Tom Cruise, travel, trees, war
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As Colombo emerges from the Covid lockdown, I go immediately to one of my favourite places. — For The Critic
Filed in correspondence, Journalism
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Also tagged Alfred Douglas, Andre Gide, Arthur C Clarke, bibliomania, books, bookshops, Borges, Ceylon, coconuts, Colombo, colonialism, Covid-19, Craig Raine, Cyril Connolly, David Blacker, David Kugultinov, David Nichol Smith, Dee Brown, Dervla Murphy, Dickens, Edmund Waller, education, EM Forster, English, fauna, Georges Bataille, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Harold Nicolson, Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Joan Collins, Joseph Conrad, Kalmykia, Lenin, libraries, Lionel Shriver, Louis Mountbatten, Madeleine Albright, Maradana, Michael Ondaatje, Nabokov, Peter Ackroyd, Richard Flanagan, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Sinhala, Tamil, Teilhard de Chardin, The Critic, the Duke of Pirajno, The New Yorker, Tom Wolfe
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A lockdown letter from Colombo. — For The Critic
Filed in correspondence, Journalism
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Also tagged Amazon, Argentina, army, beer, children, China, Colombo, coronavirus, cricket, Dominic Hilton, drink, Facebook, food, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, health, letters, lockdown, May Day, Mel Gibson, money, Osama bin Laden, painting, peacocks, quizzes, Sanskrit, shopping, Singapore, Sinhala, socialism, swimming, the British, The Critic, UberEats, work
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. A banker’s license in the United Kingdom costs £30 per annum. — The Nelson Evening Mail, Friday, July 17 1908 . Sri Lanka has only 500 cases of the Coronavirus. Germany has no elite universities. There are a lot of porno videos featuring Scarlett Johansson’s face. Mexico City is a good place to be an […]
Filed in Journalism, NEWS AT A GLANCE
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Also tagged America, army, boys, Chaucer, coronavirus, Danes, education, finance, Genghis Khan, Germany, Hamlet, health, Journalism, Mexico, Muslims, Nelson Evening Mail, Olympics, pornography, potatoes, satire, Scarlett Johansson, Scooby-Doo, Simone Biles, space travel, sport, Søren Kierkegaard, the internet, the Maldives, The Spectator, the UK, writers
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Or; Some Further Notes Towards the Bestiary To the researches of the antiquary and scholar Jorge Luis ‘Vintage’ Borges, a few points offer further context on that most peripatetic of birds in this, our present century. . Learned reports come from South Asia, where the spotted-bill Filipino pelican (phillipensis) is found, with no small irony, only in Cambodia, the Indian peninsular, and in Sri Lanka (or the contemporary […]
Filed in Fictions
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Also tagged America, animals, army, babies, basketball, Borges, British Library, Cambodia, Captain Scott, children, Colombo, Corpus Christi College, daughters, death, Egypt, employment, fables, food, Gartagena, General John Guise, Hebrew, hieroglyphs, Horapollo, India, Jesuits, John Grisham, Joseph Hall, King Lear, murder, oil, pelican, Post-modern Bestiary, psychology, Roald Dahl, Spain, St James's Palace, St James's Park, St Jerome, stupidity, the Bible, The Spectator, Thomas Aquinas, US Supreme Court
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Climbing a mountain, lest I start climbing the walls In January, I promised a visiting Reservist mate that we’d climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when, days before he landed, I went down with dengue fever. But I’d done Adam’s Peak before (the first time, Christmas ’04, probably saved my life when the tsunami struck…), and […]
Filed in feature, Journalism
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Also tagged Adam's Peak, Adidas, army, boredom, Buddhism, Christianity, cigars, coffee, Colombo, David Balfour, David Sharp, Everest, Fa-Hsien, Forrest Gump, health, Hinduism, Ibn Battuta, Islam, Marco Polo, meteorology, mosquitoes, mountaineering, music, Neighbours, podcasts, River Kwai, Sinhala, Spectator, stairs, Tamil, the Bible, The Mahavamsa, the Matterhorn, The West Wing, Thomas Tallis, Zumba
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DISCLAIMER: Ten years ago, I reviewed Shehan Karunatilaka’s debut novel, Chinaman, for this newspaper. It was brilliant, I said, and everyone should buy it. I noted, though, for form’s sake, that I’d done some light proofreading of the manuscript, and hoped that this would not be taken either as cause or symptom of inoperable bias. […]
Filed in Journalism, review
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Also tagged BBC, children, Colombo, Commonwealth Book Prize, cousins, cricket, death, DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, Elvis Presley, Gratiaen Award, Herodotus, independence, Marlon James, Marxism, Michael Ondaatje, Nietzsche, novels, Oscar Wilde, pangolins, Penguin India, photography, Richard de Zoysa, Shehan Karunatilaka, Singlish, Sinhala, Sunday Times (SL), The Mahavamsa, The Matrix, war, Wisden
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Ten years ago, I wrote the world’s first review of Chinaman, for the Sri Lankan Sunday Times. Last week, I interviewed Shehan Karunatilaka at the launch of his new novel, Chats with the Dead, at Barefoot Gallery. Here are the (brutally-abbreviated) highlights of those proceedings. — For The Sunday Times (SL)