Summary
Writers of South Asian descent have been garnering more and more success, acclaim, and attention. Story-Wallah gathers the finest South Asian voices in fiction for the first time in a single volume. As Shyam Selvadurai writes in his introduction, "The stories jostle up against each other . . . The effect is a marvelous cacophony that reminds me of . . . one of those South Asian bazaars, a bargaining, carnival-like milieu. The goods on sale in this instance being stories hawked by story-traders: story-wallahs." In this book, some of the world's best fiction writers hawk their wares from different parts of the South Asian diaspora -- Sri Lanka, India, the United States, Great Britain, Guyana, Malaysia, Trinidad, Fiji -- creating a virtual map of the world with their tales. These stories explore universal themes of identity, culture, and home, and Story-Wallah includes a rich array of experiences: a honeymoon in Sri Lanka, the trials of a Bangladeshi refugee in England, life on a sugar plantation in Trinidad, the attempts of an Indian family to arrange a marriage for their rebellious daughter.
This anthology is essential reading for anyone with an interest in South Asian writers and the dynamic, important tales they have to tell.
Shyam Selvadurai is a novelist and writer for television. He was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1965. Selvadurai earned a B.F.A. in creative writing from York University.
Selvadurai has written for the Canadian television shows Many Voices and Inside Voices and contributed to several journals and anthologies. Selvadurai's first novel, Funny Boy, was nominated for the Giller Prize and received the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. It also earned the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Men's Fiction.
(Bowker Author Biography)
