Anuk Arudpragasam on John Berger's G.
Anuk Arudpragasam, author of the 2021 Booker Prize-shortlisted A Passage North, on why he thinks John Berger’s 1972 Booker Prize-winning novel G. is ‘hugely impressive’.
A Passage North was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. Anuk Arudpragasam's masterful novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of the devastation of Sri Lanka's 30-year civil war.
As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province to attend a family funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, and an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka’s 30-year civil war, this procession to a pyre ‘at the end of the earth’ lays bare the imprints of an island’s past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek.
Anuk Arudpragasam
About the Author
Anuk Arudpragasam was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. He is an award-winning Sri Lankan Tamil novelist.I didn’t set out to write about war when I began writing fiction
Video highlights
Listen to an extract from A Passage North
Audie nominated and multi-AudioFile Earphones Award winning narrator Neil Shah brings A Passage North to life in the audiobook.
What might feel affected or even tedious in the hands of a lesser writer becomes atmospheric in Arudpragasam’s extraordinary prose
