Shyam Selvadurai

"I spent an extremely productive month in March 2010, as a guest of the Sun House, serving as its writer-in-residence. Though writers and hotels have had a long history together, I have always resisted working in a hotel because there is a functionality to even the most opulent hotel-- an off putting sense of being a cog in an ever turning wheel that spins guests in and out. The Sun House, however, did not feel like a hotel at all. It used to be the home of a well known jewellery designer, and its current owner has preserved all the idiosyncratic details of a life lived- the faded, falling apart books in the shelves, the strange bits of decor, picked up from various travel adventures, that no interior decorator could ever have dreamed up. This created for me a feeling of being at home, which in turn allowed me to settle in and write. I was touched by how quickly the staff made me one of the household, learning my habits to the point that they could anticipate what I was going to ask for.  The sense of being at home was enhanced by the comfortable living room and bar, where I always felt free to lounge, feet cocked up, reading into the evening as I sipped on a gin and tonic. Soon a waiter would come to tell me that my dinner was waiting on the verandah, and I would go out to cicadas trilling in the garden trees and the Call to Prayer from a neighbourhood mosque ringing poignantly in the dark. "

Shyam Selvadurai was born in Colombo Sri Lanka. Funny Boy his first novel was published to acclaim in 1994 and won the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and The Lambda Literary Award in the U.S. He is the author of Cinnamon Gardens and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea and the editor of an anthology, Story-wallah! A Celebration of South Asian Fiction. His books have been published in the U.S, U.K and India, and published in translation in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey and Israel.