He plays ‘bride-bride’ dress-up with his girl cousins. The semi-autobiographical story: on the weekends all the relatives gather at the grandparents' house where the young boy shuns (and is shunned by) the other boys playing cricket. We don’t get any real overview of the nation’s geography and history in the book (it’s semi-autobiographical fiction), but as a former geography professor I can’t resist giving a brief ‘in a nutshell’ overview at the end of this review for those who are interested. The young boy’s family is Tamil and they are in the minority. The setting is Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) during the 1980s or so, so the second major theme is politics: the horrible violence between two ethnic groups: the Tamils and the Sinhalese. He was a contributor to TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 1.Īs you might guess from the title, this is a story of a young boy discovering his homosexuality. Swimming won the Lambda Literary Award in the Children's and Youth Literature category in 2006.

He published a young adult novel, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, in 2005. In 2004, Selvadurai edited a collection of short stories: Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers, which includes works by Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali, and Hanif Kureishi, among others. Selvadurai recounted an account of the discomfort he and his partner experienced during a period spent in Sri Lanka in 1997 in his essay 'Coming Out' in Time Asia's special issue on the Asian diaspora in 2003. He studied creative and professional writing as part of a Bachelor of Fine Arts program at York University. Ethnic riots in 1983 drove the family to emigrate to Canada when Selvadurai was nineteen. Selvadurai was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka to a Sinhalese mother and a Tamil father-members of conflicting ethnic groups whose troubles form a major theme in his work.

He currently lives in Toronto with his partner Andrew Champion. Shyam Selvadurai is a Sri Lankan-Canadian novelist who wrote Funny Boy (1994), which won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and Cinnamon Gardens (1998).

Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai