Festivals

Since The Prisoner of Paradise was published at the beginning of the year, I have been to three festivals. The first was the Galle Literary Festival in January. The new book had its first outing there, with a short reading on the opening night of the festival and then a full session with Gita Hariharan.

 

 

 

From Galle I went to India for the Jaipur Literature Festival. I could only make it for the last couple of days of the festival with a session on The Match with Rahul Bhattacharya and another with Richard Flanagan, Nathacha Appanah, Roshi Fernando and Jamaica Kincaid which I chaired. The biggest festival in Asia but overshadowed in the end by the debacle of the Rushdie affair.

 

 

I returned to Sri Lanka from Jaipur so that I could go to Jaffna for a very special event at the Jaffna Public Library. The first literary event of its kind since the end of the war. We had about a hundred students from a teacher training college and other colleges. The other two writers were Roshi Fernando from the UK and Ayathurai Shanthan from Jaffna.

 

 

Last month I went to the Dubai Festival of Literature. Sessions on identity, The Prisoner of Paradise and the glitter of prizes.