Magul Gedara is a collection of short stories by Martin Wickramasinghe (1890-1976), the Sinhala novelist, critic and essayist often called the father of modern Sinhala literature. It was first published in 1927, and English-language bibliographies render the title as The Wedding. This is a Sinhala-language edition.
The book belongs to the earliest phase of Wickramasinghe's work as a short-story writer. His first collection, Geheniyak, appeared in 1924, and Magul Gedara followed three years later, at a time when he was also publishing his early novels. The volume as it is offered today by the Martin Wickramasinghe Trust's bookshop is described as gathering twenty of his early stories, written between 1924 and 1935.
Because of that span, the collection is a useful way to follow how his short fiction developed. Critics such as Jayadeva Uyangoda have argued that Wickramasinghe's artistic imagination went through a fundamental change during the 1920s, moving away from the openly moralising approach of his first novel, Leela, towards quieter, more sympathetic portraits of ordinary people. The stories in Magul Gedara come from those formative years, before the later collections such as Pavkarayata Galgesima, Handa Sakki Kima and Vahallu.
Wickramasinghe wrote more than a hundred short stories over his career, and this volume shows where that body of work began. It suits readers of Sinhala who want to explore his short fiction from its early years, and students tracing how the modern Sinhala short story took shape.
- Author: Martin Wickramasinghe
- Published: 1927
- Language: Sinhala
