Romesh Gunesekera

Gunesekera is internationally acclaimed for fiction that explores key themes of our times – political, ecological, economic - through novels and stories of wide appeal that spotlight the complexities of people’s lives and the choices they are forced to make. His ten books include Reef, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, The Sandglass, (given the inaugural BBC Asia Award), and The Match, a pathbreaking cricket novel. Noontide Toll (2014), is a darkly humorous cycle of linked stories that capture a vital moment in post-war Sri Lanka. His most recent novel, Suncatcher (2019), returns to an earlier era in Ceylon and a story of divided loyalties and endangered friendship in the turbulent 1960s. Gunesekera has been widely translated and won numerous prizes for his fiction including a Premio Mondello (Italy). He was the Chair of the judges of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2015 and has also judged Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists (2013), the Caine Prize and the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award among others. He is the co-author of the Writers’ & Artists’ Companion to Novel Writing and has run fiction workshops and masterclasses internationally. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Gunesekera is a a judge for the International Booker Prize 2024.