A novel in English by Punyakante Wijenaike, and the book that won her the Gratiaen Prize — the award established by Michael Ondaatje for Sri Lankan writing in English. That prize is the clearest thing to say about where this title sits in her work: it marks the novel as the one her contemporaries singled out, from a career already long by the time it appeared.
Wijenaike was born in Colombo and wrote in English throughout her life, publishing novels and short-story collections and placing stories in newspapers, journals and anthologies both in Sri Lanka and abroad. Her novels include The Waiting Earth and Giraya, the latter adapted as a teledrama by Sri Lanka's Independent Television Network — an unusual afterlife for an English-language Sri Lankan novel, and one reason her name is familiar well beyond readers of fiction in English. She died in March of last decade's close; her writing life spanned most of the island's post-independence history.
For readers building a shelf of Sri Lankan fiction in English, Wijenaike is one of the names that has to be there, and Amulet is the prize-winning title among them. It is a compact book rather than a long one, published in Colombo by Godage International Publishers, a house that issues work in both Sinhala and English and keeps a good deal of Sri Lankan English-language writing in print — including authors whose books are otherwise difficult to find outside the country.
This is a locally published edition, printed and sold in Sri Lanka, of the kind that rarely reaches bookshops overseas. It suits readers following the Gratiaen Prize and its winners, students and teachers of South Asian literature in English, and anyone who has read The Waiting Earth or Giraya and wants to go further into Wijenaike's work.
- Author: Punyakante Wijenaike
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: English
- Pages: 160
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