Unmada Chitra (also spelled Unmada Chithra) is an early work of fiction by Martin Wickramasinghe (1890-1976), the Sinhala novelist, critic and essayist from Koggala on the south coast of Sri Lanka. It dates from 1929. This is a Sinhala-language edition from Sarasa Prakashana.
The book belongs to the first phase of Wickramasinghe's career, long before the novels for which he is best known today. His first novel, Leela, had appeared in 1914, and through the 1920s he was earning his living in Sinhala journalism, having joined the editorial staff of Dinamina in 1920 and the newspaper Lakmina in 1927. Biographical accounts record that in 1929, while editing two newspapers, he wrote both Unmada Chitra and Rohini.
These early books came some fifteen years before Gamperaliya (1944), the novel that opened his celebrated trilogy and is often described as the first Sinhala novel in the realistic tradition. Unmada Chitra is far less discussed than that later work, and published accounts of his career give it little more than a mention, so it is best approached as a window on the writer's apprentice years rather than as one of his major novels.
It suits readers who already know Wickramasinghe's better-known fiction and want to see where his writing began, and collectors building a complete shelf of his work in Sinhala.
- Author: Martin Wickramasinghe
- Publisher: Sarasa Prakashana
- Published: 1929
- Language: Sinhala
- ISBN: 978-955-0201-65-5
