Chaired by Smriti Daniel

Anuk Arudpragasam’s first book, The Story of a Marriage, earned him comparisons to W. G. Sebald and Primo Levi. His second, A Passage North, earned him a Booker short-listing. In it, Anuk explores the emotional scars from an individual’s lost love and a nation’s devastating civil war. Beginning with Krishan learning of the death of his ailing grandmother’s former caretaker, and ending, two days later, with him watching her body burn on her funeral pyre, his journey in between is a profound meditation on suffering and on the divided nation of Sri Lanka itself.