Global spotlight shifts to South & Southeast Asian storytelling, says Booker winner

Shillong, Nov 23: Sri Lankan Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka said that South East Asians, who have been hearing stories of the Europeans for over 500 years, are now “telling their own stories in their voice”.

“We have been hearing the Europeans’ stories for about 500 years. In the past decades, the world had been all about Shakespeare, renaissance, colonies, and that is not the only story. We have 2,000 years of stories,” he maintained.

Karunatilaka said that in the 1980s, he found most of the books in Sri Lanka written either by Englishmen or visitors. “These were the outsiders’ views, but from the 1990s we are telling our own stories and telling them in our voice... and that is the key,” the Sri Lankan author said.

Karunatilaka, who won the 2022 Booker Prize for his novel, The Seven Moons of Mali Almeida, was speaking at the Shillong Literary Festival. “No one can tell our stories like we can,” he added.

The celebrated author said South East Asia has about 2 billion people, who constitute a huge market that can sustain on its own. Currently, there is a “global appetite for stories from all over the world”, he said, adding that people in the west might now prefer the setting of a murder mystery in Mumbai, rather than in London or Paris.

Moreover, in the past, there was a literary bias towards the region and its people, Karunatilaka feels. “Earlier, it was considered that brown people cannot write...now they (west) do not think that way, because there are lots of global superstars from this region” he added.

Stating that these are “exciting times” for the writers of the region, Karunatilaka said that people are now reading their stories across the world.