
“As a writer, I can’t help but feel the UK is the only place I could have gained an embodied sense of my own hybridity.”
Novelist and playwright

Mister, Mister

‘I held my breath, half terrified at the stench. These were my father’s books – filled to the brim with tales of twisting, heightened lives, stained with the manias of some other age.’

Taking it seriously

‘I have a responsibility to make sure that anything I write does the job of working emotionally in the world.’
Writing with different forms

‘Writing a difficult scene in a play, there will be a jolt of recognition relating to more personal intimacies present in the novel I’m writing.’

Guy Gunaratne in conversation with Gabriel Gbadamosi
‘The language to me growing up in Neasden felt incredibly transgressive, inherently quite violent. But there is something ecstatic about that crossing or breaking a border for, say, Arabic words to feel so at home on your tongue.’

Biography
Guy Gunaratne is a British novelist and playwright. Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and longlisted for the Booker, Goldsmith’s and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
Gunaratne served as Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and is the current editor of The Jhalak Review.
