Story-Wallah

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.

Author Biography

Shyam Selvadurai was born in 1965 in Sri Lanka. Funny Boy, his first novel, was published in 1994. It won the prestigious Lambda Literary Award and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Cinnamon Gardens, his second novel, was published in 1998 and was shortlisted for the Trillium Award. Shyam is the editor of an anthology, Story-Wallah: A Celebration of South Asian Fiction, and the author of a novel for young adults, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and is the winner of the Lambda Literary Award, the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award and Silver Winner in the Young Adult Category of ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times and Time Magazine. His novel, The Hungry Ghosts, was shortlisted for Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award for Fiction and longlisted for the DSC South Asia Literature Prize. He is working on a comprehensive anthology of Sri Lankan literature.