Shyam Selvadurai

Like his protagonist Arjie, Shyam Selvadurai also grew up gay in Sri Lanka during the 1970s before fleeing at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1983. However, the character of Arjie is in no further sense based on Selvadurai's family or life—indeed, whereas Arjie is Tamil, Selvadurai had a Sinhalese mother and a Tamil father. After moving to Canada, Selvadurai studied theater at York University and wrote a handful of television plays before finding breakout success in 1994 with Funny Boy, which remains his best-known work. Funny Boy won both the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction and the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and it is also slotted for a film adaptation by the decorated Indian-Canadian director Deepa Mehta. His three other novels have covered similar themes: Cinnamon Garden (1999), set in the 1920s, follows both a young feminist pressured to marry by her family and her uncle's reunion with his male lover from decades before; Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (2005) recounts a boy falling in love with his cousin from Canada; and The Hungry Ghosts (2013) portrays the emotional conflicts of a gay Sri Lankan-Canadian man as he sets out to return to Sri Lanka to take care of his elderly grandmother, who rejected his sexuality when he first came out. Selvadurai has explained that one of his writing's fundamental goals is to help queer youth accept their sexuality. Selvadurai has also edited two anthologies: Story-Wallah (2004), a selection of short fiction from the South Asian diaspora, and Many Roads Through Paradise (2014), a similar volume focused on Sri Lanka. His novels have been translated into various languages, and he has also written short stories and nonfiction for publications ranging from The New York Times to Toronto Life Magazine. Selvadurai has also occasionally taught writing and, notably, let a project called Write to Reconcile that helped cultivate Sri Lankan writers interested in narrating the Civil War.