• Joint Gratiaen Prize 2023 winner outlines the process of writing

The Gratiaen Prize was established by Michael Ondaatje when he won The Booker Prize for ‘The English Patient’ as a means of developing, nurturing and fostering writers of English literature.  Since the first Prize in 1993, awarded jointly to Carl Muller and Lalitha Withanachchi – the former for ‘The Jam Fruit Tree’ and the latter for ‘The Wind Blows Over the Hills – Short Stories’, the Prize has added an expansive range of writing genres into its repository of shortlists and winners. 

This year, the Prize pattern was similar to that first Gratiaen Prize in 1993, when joint Winners were announced. The 2023 Winners were Yudhanjaya Wijeratne for his novel of speculative fiction, ‘The Wretched and The Damned’ and Chiranthi Rajapakse for her collection of short stories, ‘Keeping Time and Other Stories’. 

Kaleidoscope interviewed Wijeratne last week and this week, had an extensive interview with Rajapakse, who incidentally was shortlisted for The Gratiaen Prize in 2017 for another collection of short stories, ‘Names and Numbers’.

A lawyer and currently a researcher at LIRNEasia, she has been a journalist, researcher, and project manager at various times in her career. Quite a prolific writer judging by the extensive array of articles and stories on her blog, her writings have been published in the ‘New Ceylon Writing’, the ‘City,’ and ‘Fairlight Books’. She is also part of the team that organises the annual New Ink literary forum. 

Following are excerpts of the interview:

A Shortlist in 2017 and a Win in 2023 is quite a feat. Both your publications submitted to The Gratiaen are collections of short stories. What is it that resonates with you when it comes to writing short stories?

Maybe because my writing is quite concise, I’m drawn to the short story format. I don’t even know if it was a conscious decision to write short stories in both these instances. Usually, my writing begins with an incident or with something that I’m trying to describe; in my case, these become short stories. I’ve noticed that the stories have become longer as I’ve gone along – because my first collection was quite short. 

So, what is ‘Keeping Time and Other Stories’ all about?

It’s a collection of short stories that focuses on the lives of a group of different Sri Lankans and how they try to navigate their lives in a country that’s always on the edge of some sort of crisis. Each of them deals with different situations; one of them is about a man who has a job interview the next day and cannot sleep because there’s a loudspeaker next door, and another is about a woman who is trying to get a dress sewn for her child, but there’s much more at stake than clothes. So, the stories are about everyday incidents. 

How did you collate the short stories? Do you work with a number of storylines and then prune them? What is the process?

I’m usually in the process of writing something – stories, fiction or non-fiction. My first collection ‘Names and Numbers’ was published in 2017, and this collection, ‘Keeping Time’ is what I’ve been working on since then. When I finish a draft, I put it away. I return to it later, reading it as an outsider, a process that is difficult and I usually don’t succeed, but I try. Once I’ve gone through these, I choose those that seem to work best and hope that they work.

What are some of the revelations you came across while writing ‘Keeping Time’?

For me, writing is the way that I try to explain things to myself, or maybe something to live by, or I’m curious about the way somebody else lives. When I start writing a story, I don’t usually know the whole thing. I figure out the story as I write. 

Would you ever want to put a novel together?

I have been working on a draft of a novel, but I don’t feel that it is complete yet. Possibly, in the future, a novel might come around. 

You say that you hate first drafts but you enjoy rewriting. When does your writing become a first draft?

A first draft is when I feel that it actually seems like a story. My writing may start from something that I’ve seen, perhaps an incident, and then I keep writing until the story has worked itself out. That’s the point where I complete the first draft. Then, I come back to it later and rewrite. That process is easier for me than the actual process of trying to start writing something. It’s that initial start that’s very hard for me.

How has your experience as a lawyer, researcher, and project manager helped in your writing?

Every experience feeds into my writing, everything that I’ve seen, everybody that I’ve interacted with, and everything that I’ve been exposed to. More than the actual job, it’s the experience that you undergo as a result of having that work is what fuels it all. 

I took a look at your blog. The writings range from travel to memoirs to personal to observations. What inspires you to put pen to paper?

Inspiration is a difficult word. It’s more like curiosity or some kind of emotion. The memoir that I wrote is about my grandfather. It was called ‘Looking Back’ and came about as my mother recalled stories and regaled them to me in my childhood. The piece has political shades as it featured aspects of the 1950 riots, which I was interested in because of the differences between personal recollection of history and the history that we were taught in school. We are never taught some aspects of history and it is those differences that interested me and led me to write that piece.

Whenever you write, do you have a message in mind for the reader?

I don’t have a conscious message. What people take from my work depends on each person, on their experience, and what they take out of it. It can be quite different from what I’ve intended. One story in this collection titled ‘When She’s Older’ which was published online was tagged as being about control and family, whereas I thought that it was more about the relationship between a husband and wife, so there are differences in the way that my stories are perceived.

Why do you write?

I write to make sense of the world, trying to understand what I don’t understand or understand someone else’s life out of curiosity. Writing is something that you have to do alone, which is difficult sometimes, but, it suits me as I’m an introverted person. I’m lucky, because there aren’t many things that you can do on your own. 

What’s next?

This current collection is in manuscript form, so, I need to get that published, first of all. With my writing, I will probably go on with it. I’m usually working on something, so there will definitely be more things to come. 

Any words of wisdom for aspiring writers?

I’m not very good with words of wisdom and can only talk about what I’ve done. Ninety percent of writing is reading, so you have to read a lot and write a lot. With everything you write, some of it will work out. It’s also important to have a support system. I’m lucky that my family is supportive; my large extended family, my parents, and my sister Thilini, who is often my first reader, can always be counted on. Much of the time, writing is about ignoring everything and staring at a laptop screen, so it helps to have support from someone, whether it is family, friends, or writing groups, different things work for different people. One of the best things about The Gratiaen is being able to interact with the longlisted and shortlisted writers and this year (2023), their works, though diverse in genre, dealt with life in Sri Lanka. The diversity of writing is fascinating. I hope that the publicity that surrounds The Gratiaen will encourage more people to read the selected works and the bookshops to stock them.  The only way that writers can keep doing what they do is if people read their work.

(The writer is the host, director, and co-producer of the weekly digital programme ‘Kaleidoscope with Savithri Rodrigo’ which can be viewed on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. She has over three decades of experience in print, electronic, and social media.)