Sri Lankan Novelist Anuk Arudpragasam Reflects on War, Guilt, and Fiction at Mahindra Humanities Center Talk

Sri Lankan novelist Anuk Arudpragasam argued at the Mahindra Humanities Center on Monday that fiction can give moral weight to lives shaped by civil war — and to the guilt of surviving it.

The conversation, moderated by English professor Tara K. Menon, focused on Arudpragasam’s two published novels and his forthcoming third book, grounding his work in the legacy of Sri Lanka’s 1983-2009 civil war, which killed tens of thousands of Tamil civilians.

The talk came as renewed fighting in the Middle East over the weekend drew fresh attention to state violence — which Menon said made Arudpragasam’s reflections especially timely.

“With the bombing of Iran this weekend, I can’t think of a novelist who’s writing about more important things than what it means to be the kind of victim of that kind of state sponsored violence,” she said in an interview before the event. “And he writes about it really, really beautifully and really sensitively.”

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