Anuk Arudpragasam


Anuk Arudpragasam is a Sri Lankan Tamil novelist writing in English and Tamil. His debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage was published in 2016 by Macmillan and was subsequently translated into French, German, Czech, Mandarin, Dutch and Italian. The novel, which takes place in 2009 during the final stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War, won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the German Internationaler Literaturpreis.

Biography

Born in Colombo to Tamil parents, Arudpragasam moved to the United States at the age of 18 to attend Stanford University for his undergraduate studies. In 2011 he moved to New York City to begin a PhD in philosophy at Columbia University. He currently resides between Sri Lanka and India.

''The Story of a Brief Marriage''

The novel, written between 2011 and 2014, describes a day and a night in the lives of two young Tamils, Dinesh and Ganga, who are forced into a marriage as the Sri Lankan army intensifies its bombardment of the camp on the north-eastern coast where they are taking refuge. "I grew up in the south of Sri Lanka in a well-off family, as insulated as someone could be from the war," Arudpragasam told Guernica magazine. "It was an attempt to cross certain kinds of differences in experience between myself and these many other people in the north of the country who I had become separated from."
A review in The New York Times commended the novel for "giving the innocents a place in history" and making readers "kneel before the elegance of the human spirit". The Wall Street Journal celebrated it as a "small work of art whittled from atrocity." Novelist Colm Toibin praised Arudpragasam's dense and attentive style: "Every image in the book, including the most desolate, is rendered with precision and an aura of pure truth and tenderness." The book was listed as one of the best novels of 2016 by The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the Financial Times. It won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Shakthi Bhatt First Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Internationaler Literaturpreis.