Page 26 - Toronto North Lifestyle May 2022

SHYAM SELVADURAI, author of
Mansions of the Moon
Over the last twenty-five years, Shyam Selvadurai has earned a distinguished reputation as one of Canada’s most acclaimed writers. He exploded on to the Canadian literary landscape with the publication of his debut novel Funny Boy. The powerful and poignant tale of a boy’s bittersweet passage to maturity and sexual awakening set against the backdrop of political tensions in Sri Lanka in the early 1980s was met with great acclaim from critics and readers alike. The Literary Review (UK) raved that “Selvadurai has a genius for touching a nerve with a feather-like touch...Funny Boy is a powerful and beautifully written novel.” The New York Times Book Review said that “Shyam Selvadurai writes as sensitively about the emotional intensity of adolescence as he does about the wonder of childhood.” And the Calgary Herald declared Funny Boy to be a “moving and beautiful first novel...Love, within and across gender and race, is at the heart of this complex and questioning remarkable book.” Funny Boy was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and won the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award.
In 1998, Selvadurai returned with Cinnamon Gardens, a novel that explores the life and times of a remarkable family in 1920s Ceylon. The New York Times Book Review called the book “faultlessly elegant,” while the Sunday Times (UK) proclaimed Cinnamon Gardens to be “richly rewarding...deserves and will surely gain a wide readership.” The novel became a national bestseller and was shortlisted for the Trillium Award.
Selvadurai followed the success of Cinnamon Gardens by writing Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, a young adult novel that won the Lambda Literary Award in the Children’s and Youth Literature category and editing a well- received anthology entitled Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers.
26 TORONTO NORTH Lifestyle MAY 2022 Continued on Page 27