Anuk Arudpragasam was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. He is an award-winning Sri Lankan Tamil novelist.

His first, The Story of a Brief Marriage, won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Arudpragasam studied philosophy in the United States, receiving a doctorate at Columbia University. He credits Descartes’ Meditations, which he discovered as a teenager in a bookshop near his home in Columbo, Sri Lanka, for setting him off on that path. He is currently working on a new novel about mothers and daughters in the Tamil diaspora.

I didn’t set out to write about war when I began writing fiction

All nominated books

A Passage North