Indran Amirthanayagam

“Writing a novel requires a lot of digging out, chucking away, selecting, molding, shaping, and reshaping of all the above; and then hoping for the best.”

What Does it Mean to be a Sri Lankan poet in the diaspora?

There are too few words
and in them
an immense silence is frozen.

What follows is a small selection of modern poetry from Sri Lanka—a selection designed for some imaginary capsule, to be packed in with the American Beats, the librarian Larkin, Neruda the Captain, Paz the writer of silences, Popa the puppeteer, and Plath and Bishop and Walcott and, of course, many others.

Pagan Love Song

‘We got a call a few minutes ago. Pappa has died,