He has been a judge for a number of literary prizes including the Caine Prize for African Writing, the David Cohen Literature Prize, the Forward Prize for Poetry and most recently the Granta 2013 list of the Best of Young British Novelists. Romesh Gunesekera is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has also received a National Honour in Sri Lanka. His most recent book, Noontide Toll, was published in 2014. His next novel The Prisoner of Paradise was published in 2012. In 2008, a collection of his Madeira stories were published in a bilingual edition to celebrate its 500th anniversary of the founding of Funchal in Madeira. His third novel, Heaven’s Edge, a dystopian novel set in the near future was published by Bloomsbury.įour years later Bloomsbury also published The Match hailed as one of the first novels in which cricket was celebrated, and a forerunner of the many cricket-related novels that have followed.

In 1995 he won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award in Britain. The previous year he was awarded one of the prestigious Italian literary prizes: the Premio Mondello Five Continents. In 1998, he received the inaugural BBC Asia Award for Achievement in Writing & Literature for his novel The Sandglass. It was shortlisted for several prizes and named a New York Times Notable Book for 1993.

In the USA he was nominated for a New Voice Award.īefore that, in 1992 his first collection of stories, Monkfish Moon, was one of the first titles in Granta’s venture into book publishing. His widely acclaimed first novel, Reef, was published in 1994 and was short-listed as a finalist for the Booker Prize, as well as for the Guardian Fiction Prize. His early stories were published in Stand Magazine, London Magazine and Granta and his poems in the LRB, Poetry Durham and other magazines. Before coming to Britain he also lived in the Philippines. Romesh Gunesekera was born in 1954 in Sri Lanka where he spent his early years.

Reef by Romesh Gunesekera