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In Appreciative Memory of Karen Roberts, 1965-2018-by Michael Roberts Source:Thuppahis It has been something of a shock for me to discover that the Sri Lankan authoress Karen Roberts[1] had passed away in USA in 2018 while only in her middle-aged fifties (about the same age as my daughters). What a tragedy!   My links with Karen are three-fold. Firstly, her novel July is centred on the cataclysmic set of events in Sri Lanka in late July 1983 when Tamils residing in the south-central regions of the island were assailed in shocking ways. The imprint of this awful event on my reflections is embodied in an ethnographic essay of my own which was written up in 1991 and is as much a heartfelt literary essay[2] as a documentary-political account: namely “The Agony and Ecstasy of a Pogrom: Southern Lanka, July 1983.” Secondly, I was familiar with her lineage links because I had banged into one ...