Shankari Chandran Wins 2023 Miles Franklin Award for “Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens”
Source : Qld Sri Lankan Newsletter – Dæhæna – August 2023
Shankari Chandran’s Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, an intergenerational epic confronting Australia’s uneasy relationship with multiculturalism and postcolonial trauma, has won the 2023 Miles Franklin literary award.
Chandran, a Sydney-based lawyer of Tamil heritage, collected the prestigious $60,000 award in Sydney on Tuesday night. The judges praised Chandran’s third novel, set in an aged care facility in contemporary western Sydney and Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war, as an accomplished work of character, dialogue and action.
“It treads carefully on contested historical claims, reminding us that horrors forgotten are horrors bound to be repeated, and that the reclamation and retelling of history cannot be undertaken without listening to the story-tellers amongst us,” the judges’ said in a joint statement.
But Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens very nearly didn’t get written, let alone published, Chandran said. Sales for her second book, a futuristic thriller titled The Barrier, were modest and publishers had
outright rejected her follow-up manuscript.
“In my heart I felt Chai Time would never be published in Australia, which gave me the freedom to write in the way that I wanted to write, with complete honesty,” she said. “And not only was it a liberating experience, it also just felt like the right time for me to finally explore the issues of race and identity in Australia.”
Courtesy : https://www.theguardian.com/
