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Photograph of Shankari Chandran by Clare Lewis Photography

Shankari Chandran is a novelist and a lawyer whose experience in the field of social justice informs much of her creative writing. Born in London to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, her life and work have been shaped by the cultures of three countries in three continents. After growing up in Australia, she spent ten years in London working as a lawyer before returning to Sydney in 2010 where she started her writing career. Her debut novel Song of the Sun God (Chandran 2017a)—a family saga chronicling Sri Lanka’s war through the history of a Sri Lankan Tamil family—was recently commissioned for television. It was short-listed for Sri Lanka’s Fairway National Literary Award in 2017 and long-listed for the Dublin Literary Award in 2019. The story begins in 1932 and its protagonists, Nala and Rajan, are married in 1946, just before Sri Lanka’s independence from Britain. With the country’s descent into civil war, they are forced to make profound decisions that will affect them, their children and grandchildren, and take their diasporic story across three continents until the narrative ends in Sydney in 2010. The book drew enthusiastic responses from readers and literary critics for its intelligent and well-informed treatment of race, language, migration and Sri Lankan history. Chandran’s richly textured writing moves at the outset from the young Rajan’s witnessing of the shocking self-immolation of a monk to the homogeneous, warm world of his first home, conveyed through details of cooking and reading:

Every day, Rajan read until it was dark and then he read by candlelight. He meticulously scraped wax from the bottom of the dish with his footruler. He would reuse it with a new wick tomorrow. Years ago, Lali had shown him how; she was very careful. For his birthdays he never asked for books because they were so expensive—he could borrow books—instead he asked for candles.

As Shankari Chandran reveals in her interview, much of her own family history, life on three continents, historical research, social and legal awareness are explored in her first novel, as well as her own reflections on home and homeliness: “Song of the Sun God was a way for me to explore, find or even create, a connection to Sri Lanka—the actual Sri Lanka, the historic one and the Sri Lanka that I had received through my family’s memories”.

Moving from a historical novel to a dystopian thriller set in the future, her second book The Barrier (Chandran 2017b) creates a world devastated by religious war and the Ebola epidemic. Short-listed for the Norma K. Hemming Award for Speculative Fiction (2018), it uses “action-packed, tech-savvy speculative fiction to examine intractable problems of today’s world” enthused the reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald. Within three years it was to prove remarkably prophetic in the light of the onset of COVID-19. The book is abuzz with ideas and, with its “faith-inhibiting” side-effects of a vaccine, rogue virologists and debates about faith, freedom and justice, is in some ways closer to the concerns of Song of the Sun God than one might initially think.

Shankari Chandran has completed a third novel, which combines the generic elements of her previous two works: a political thriller set in post-war Sri Lanka. A fourth novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, is forthcoming with Ultimo Press.

The interviewer, Birte Heidemann, is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Dresden University of Technology, Germany. Her most recent publications include Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature (Palgrave, 2016) and the co-edited collection Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). Her work has appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Wasafiri, and Postcolonial Text, among others.

Birte Heidemann (BH): Shankari, you grew up in Australia and began working as a lawyer in London. Only in 2010, after moving back home and giving birth to your fourth child, did you decide to commit to creative writing. Could you tell me a bit more about what prompted you to switch careers and become a full-time writer?

Shankari Chandran (SC): We moved back to Australia because I wanted to bring our children back to my home, to the home of my childhood. But when I returned, I felt disillusioned and disappointed, and I felt that home was not home. And through that sense of disappointment, I felt lost, and I turned to writing in order to work through my feelings. I began by just blogging for myself, and it actually attracted a following. After the following grew, the blog was picked up by a lifestyle website that introduced my writing to a much broader audience in Australia. This gave me the confidence to attempt a novel—something that I had always wanted to do but for which I previously lacked the time or confidence. And so, I wanted to give that one great novel a go, a novel I think so many of us feel within us. In 2012, after a year of blogging, I attempted what eventually became Song of the Sun God. It was the first time in my life since I was young that I was not working for money, because I had chosen to be the stay-at-home carer for our family. We were having our fourth baby, and it seemed like an opportunity to pursue that ambition.

BH: You mentioned that when you returned from London to Australia (where you were born and grew up) you were terribly disillusioned and disappointed by the experience. Could you elaborate on why that was? Especially from the point of view of a traveller / diasporic? What in the return to Sydney brought you to this mood? Had London changed you? Had Sydney changed in your absence?

SC: I lived in London for ten years where I was considered (and where I quickly considered myself) a British Asian. I felt like I had a valued place in Britain, where the distinct impact of my culture on British culture was recognized, and where I felt a part of the society, entitled to claim a more equitable place in the country. Perhaps this has changed in Britain as it is changing elsewhere in the world.

When I went home to Australia in 2010, it was a shock for me. I did not understand the country I was raised in. I did not understand the hatred towards asylum seekers, the public fear-mongering about boat people and the attribution of many of our societal problems to migrants. There was a xenophobic undercurrent hidden in the rhetoric of border security, Australian-ness and patriotism.

When I turned on the TV, I wondered where all the brown people were. All multicultural representations were siloed in the ethnic public broadcaster SBS. It was as though we’d done our bit for multicultural Australia, by funding SBS; TICK. But everything else in the public space was as it has always been, monocultural and essentially white. This was also true of the bookstores—the “Australian fiction” that was making it past the gatekeepers was distinctly white.

The public spaces (the media, TV, the arts and national dialogues) were not reflecting or representing what I was seeing on the streets. They were not accepting of the Australia that I was living in and the Australia that I had brought my children back to. The disconnect was upsetting. And it was more than that—the disconnect felt like a manifestation of a deeper refusal to fully acknowledge the presence, position and value of non-white Australians. This was really troubling for me because I had actually felt at home in London, a place I had only lived in for ten years. On my return to the “home” of my childhood, I felt like Australian society did not want to accept me on my terms.

London made me feel like my South Asian-ness was normal. I had forgotten in those ten years that Australia often made me feel like an outsider, generously allowed in but only if my voice did not challenge its own.

I think my kind of normal should be recognized within the multiplicities and complexities of a rapidly evolving, dynamic and spacious Australian identity. I want my children’s kind of normal to be recognized not because they are the quiet, grateful, hardworking grandchildren of quiet, grateful, hardworking immigrants, but because they are who they are. When I returned home, I felt homeless. Writing was a way of trying to understand myself, and then write myself back into the “Australian narrative” by creating my own.

BH: For how long had you been contemplating the idea of writing?

SC: I think it was only in 2012 when Song of the Sun God took form and substance that I realized how much I loved doing it and that I really wanted to keep doing it. I wanted to create a career out of it, and I wanted to be published. There is a certain point when you are writing where you realize that you do not want to just write but you want to be published.

BH: You want to share it, your story.

SC: Yes, you want to share it with a wider audience, and you also want the validation of being published. With this particular novel, it’s from my heart and it’s for my people, so the motivation to share it with a wider audience became very powerful. You know, there is something that seeks that external validation. In terms of how long I had wanted to be a writer, I knew that I loved writing from the time I was a child. I could sense that I enjoyed it. “Enjoy” is such an empty word—I loved it. When I was in fifth grade, my teacher gave me a diary and she literally said to me: “just keep writing”. And so, I used to journal on and off from then, and I would write short stories but never consistently and never critically. I would write something but never go back to it and try to make it better. But writing has always been a way of comfort for me, a form of therapy and also one of affection. I loved it since I was young.

BH: You wrote your first novel, Song of the Sun God, on a Sri Lankan Tamil family’s history and lineage. Could I ask an additional question about why you returned to Sri Lanka and not to Sydney for your first novel? Were you returning further back into your roots from the disappointment of Sydney? Were you reaching back to ancestral roots—a diaspora tendency of course, as evidenced in several of the interviews in this book of Creative Lives—springing from lack of roots in the process of your (three-continent) routes?

SC: In Song of the Sun God, I returned to Sri Lanka and eventually settled in Australia. This narrative follows the course of my family’s life and mine—geographically but also spiritually I suppose. At university, I read T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”. The following lines have stayed with me:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

I sound so tragic, but these lines still move me and I often find myself thinking about them. As a member of a diasporic generation born outside of our ancestral homeland, I have often felt without roots. I have often felt untethered and have longed for that deeper sense of belonging that my parents take so deeply for granted that they do not even know they have it.

Growing up in Australia, I did not feel I “fitted”, nor did I have a relationship with or lived connection to Sri Lanka. Song of the Sun God was a way for me to explore, find or even create, a connection to Sri Lanka—the actual Sri Lanka, the historic one and the Sri Lanka that I had received through my family’s memories. The family in the book, like me, loses home (in the different ways we define home) and must create a new one. Writing the book was developmental and cathartic for me in that it helped me understand and accept so much: where I have come from (ancestrally); what I cannot have, reclaim or be; and who I am now. All of that is evolving, dynamic and imperfect but it’s mine.

BH: It is interesting that you are using words like “comfort” and “therapy”. I wonder whether it was the very act of writing that helped you navigate all these shifts in your life at that time?

SC: Absolutely.

BH: So, writing is an escape, a comfort and an energising force; you write from the nest of the family. But are you also escaping the wider diaspora of Sydney in which you live, into a Sri Lanka that might have been more positive and inclusive of you, perhaps? An original homeland—even if you were not born there?

SC: No, because it is very hard to see Sri Lanka, given its recent history, as a place that could be more inclusive of the Tamil people. For that, I would need to re-write history, and I wanted to create a novel that was as historically accurate as I could.

BH: The process of writing and sharing your story with a wider audience can be unsettling. Does the act of writing—developing a story, its characters, a setting—still serve as something settling or comforting for you?

SC: I think, 100 percent, yes, it does. Overall, I am, as a person, far more grounded and at peace with myself when I am writing. It comforts me, it uplifts me, and it connects me to myself. I feel my most authentic self and very present when I am in the middle of writing. It might seem contradictory that I feel very present when I have deliberately taken myself to another world. When I am writing, I am 100 percent in that world to the point where my husband is concerned that if there was a house fire, I wouldn’t be aware of it. So, I don’t write and don’t even edit on screen when my children are home. I will research when the children are in the house, and I will edit on paper. I can sit with them and do a bit of editing, but I would never work on the first draft of a manuscript or an idea when they are around because I am too deeply absorbed into that world. It’s not fair for them, and it’s not safe for them. I owe them as their mother the mindfulness and the presence. I need to give that to them when they are with me.

The other part of that answer though is that I often write about very traumatic things and that is unsettling for me. It is traumatic for me. When you write, you really are inside your mind, the picture is very clear, and you are with those people. You are as close to them as you could possibly be, without being them, and that is traumatic. At the end of the day, depending on what I have been writing about, I find that I really need to take some time to pull myself out of that world and re-set my mind for reality and my children. On those days, I need to just hold them for a while to be reassured that reality is safe and secure, and that my children are OK.

BH: You write about the Sri Lankan civil war in both your first and (I gather) third novel-in-progress. What is your angle? How do you see it, as someone in some senses outside—a diasporic—returning to the land of her ancestors, one that is not immediately “yours”? Also, did you feel welcome in Sri Lanka? How did Sri Lanka receive you?

SC: For both Song of the Sun God and The Phantom Limb (my third novel), I spent a lot of time researching and interviewing insiders—Sri Lankans with lived experience of the events and places I write about. However, my writing will always be from the outsider’s perspective. I am a diasporic outsider, someone with an ancestral connection and love for the place, but still an outsider. At times, this gives me an ability to see things that are best seen from the outside. And at other times, it means that I am not seeing as much as I should. My lens is obscured and distorted.

My angle is Tamil and I can’t apologise for that—I can only tell the reader who I am. I can declare my conflict of interest as it were, whilst also reiterating that I tried to write as historically accurately as I could, interrogating the motivations, actions and failures of all of the stakeholders in both the micro (family) and macro (political) story I told. I felt that bias and inaccuracies would undermine the veracity and credibility of the whole piece, and I wanted people to read this perspective of Sri Lanka rather than dismiss it. The lawyer in me also wants detail, facts and testimony—in a sense, the truth.

I felt so welcome in Sri Lanka—all people welcomed me and supported my research. People wanted to talk and share their stories, even the ugly, hard ones. All people are storytellers, not just writers. We are unburdened by telling stories. We bind ourselves to each other by telling stories. I felt truly welcomed. The response to Song of the Sun God in Sri Lanka has been really humbling. People read it and reach out to me. It has been an honour to write something that seems to resonate with Tamils and Sinhalese people.

BH: In fact, I was wondering how you would manage to switch between the often-violent worlds of your writing and the all-encompassing world of motherhood. I can imagine that moving from writing a war scene onto making dinner or helping with homework can be quite exhausting. And even if the process of writing is mostly comforting for you, the task of traversing both worlds—the real and the imagined, the one around you and the one inside of you—might drain energy from you as well.

SC: I think one of the contradictions of writing is that it is really energizing and exhilarating to write. I am very uplifted when I write and if I don’t write, I can feel a heaviness within myself. If I don’t write, I am difficult to be with. I am uncomfortable with myself, and I am slightly agitated and unsettled. At the same time, though it is energising and exhilarating, it is also meditative and prayerful. And it is traumatic and draining. It is all of those things.

BH: But fulfilling in that way?

SC: Yes, ultimately, it is incredibly fulfilling. I feel extremely fortunate that I had a job in the law that I loved. I would wake up every morning with a rush of adrenaline and march into the office determined to do something useful today. And I feel so fortunate to have had that for more than ten years, and I loved it. I thought I would never love a job as much as I loved that. But when I began to write, I realized I had found something that I loved more.

BH: Judging from the two novels that came out in one year, and the third one already in the works, you are undoubtedly a prolific writer. This makes me all the more curious about your writing routines, especially being a mother of four. You’ve already shared some of your routines but how exactly do you find the time and space to work on your manuscripts? And do you have a fixed workspace from where you write at more or less fixed times, or do you squeeze in time for writing whenever and wherever you can?

SC: That is a great question, because I love to hear how other authors do it. I am fascinated, because every author always thinks of other authors doing it so much better. I work in a very small study, which is about the size of a closet and has no windows or natural lighting. My husband finds this hilarious and a little unhealthy, too. He worries that it is just not natural to sit in a small windowless room for hours on end with the doors shut. When he tries to work an hour in the shared study, he finds it very difficult. For me, the reason I am fine with that space is because I am not there. It is because I will be inside my mind, I will be in Sri Lanka in 1932 or in 2014 and, most recently, I’ve been in Sri Lanka in 2009. So, I am not in the room, the physical room, but mostly in the past.

From 2013 to 2016, I had a very good routine. Whenever the children were not in the house, I would sit down to write. When my youngest child started school, I was able to do this more effectively because I had no children in my house then. I used to walk the children to school, with the dog, and run back to start my day of writing. I am quite organized and disciplined and try to ignore everything else during the middle of the day. Chances are I did the laundry at ten o’clock the night before, because I yearn for my time to write. There are a number of things that eat into my writing time but on a “writing day” I will sit down at 9:15 to write and at 2:30 a really loud alarm will go off to give me 15 minutes to pull myself out of wartime Sri Lanka and allow myself to re-enter the leafy streets of our neighbourhood. And then I will be with my children in the way they deserve it. So, I have a really compressed writing schedule, which can be very stressful because there is so much to say in so little time. All the things that parents do, I will try and do late in the evening, like cooking dinner for the following night, bulk producing spaghetti bolognese and chicken curry, answering the endless notes from the PTA. This is how my day used to be structured in the past.

BH: So how has your routine changed, and what prompted you to change it?

SC: With my third novel, I tried out something different. It was very deliberate because that year of my life was a very unsettled one. We had a lot of sickness in the family, and I returned to work as a lawyer. So, I had things that pulled me away from writing, and I was becoming increasingly stressed and anxious that I was not writing my third novel. I had an idea, but I was not able to create or protect the time to write. I remembered Stephen King’s book On Writing where he says: “just put superglue on your bum and bash it out”. It’s easy for Stephen King to say this because he is a full-time, successful and well-paid writer, but I thought, OK, let me try this. He sets himself aggressive targets, like 3,000 words a day in six hours of writing. I was at a stage where I just could not give it six hours of writing a day. But I could put superglue on my bum, and I could set some targets for myself. I am very target orientated, perhaps because I am a lawyer. If you set me a target, like a robot, I feel the need to achieve that target. So, I would say 500 words a day or 1,000, and I would secretly be aiming for 2,000. I wrote the first draft of that third novel in eight weeks because in every spare moment, I would try to channel Stephen King. Even if it were only for ten minutes, I would sit down and just bash it out. I didn’t look at it again. I didn’t read it. I didn’t ask myself if it’s any good because those questions are the death knell. I just tried to bash it out. And then I had to stop when my first and second novel came out, so I didn’t look at the draft until some four months later. I was terrified to open the document, to look at what I had actually produced. I went back to it very anxiously but, for a first draft, it was okay. It needs a lot more work and it needs energy and it needs time. I have been doing that this year, but I need to do more. As a first draft, it wasn’t terrible though, and I was relieved to realize this.

BH: Indeed, it must have been very reassuring to realize that you were able to pull this together despite your disrupted and unpredictable schedule. How would you describe the next stage of writing a novel, that is, your process of editing a first draft?

SC: It is different, but a big job. For the next round of edits, I really feel that I need a lot of time because I actually need to restructure it. I can edit language while I am in the car waiting to pick up a child from their guitar class but, for a structural edit, you need to step back and look at the whole novel. Then, you need to step in and look at individual scenes. You constantly step out and step in, and this process requires time. I do not have much time any more because I’ve returned to running a social justice program. Given that writing is not necessarily a way to create a sustainable income for a family of six, I have focused back on being a lawyer at this stage in my life. I feel fortunate to return to the law after a few years of not working in the paid economy, and I am very fortunate that it’s a job that I love.

But I do hope that I will be able to write at least a minimum amount that nourishes my soul. Time and fatigue are my worst enemies. I need to think, once again, about Stephen King and work out how to make time my friend. And I do have an hour or two in the evening if I can overcome my fatigue. Of course, we also need to allow ourselves to not write. We have to recognize that all the other things that we’re doing are valid and necessary because, as writers, all we want to do is write. That is all I want to do. I want to be with my children and my husband, occasionally hang out with friends and then write some more. I would very happily have a completely binary life where I am either with my family or writing, either writing or with my family.

BH: Maybe one day …

SC: One day, one day.

BH: I gather that that Song of the Sun God has been accepted as the basis of a TV series. Could you give an update on the progress of that project?

SC: I’m excited about the proposed TV series. Olivia Hetreed, BAFTA-winning writer of Oscar-nominated film Girl with A Pearl Earring, will adapt the novel for Synchronicity Films, producer of the recent ABC / BBC drama The Cry, and Australia’s Dragonet Films. Olivia is working on a six-part series based on the novel, and the adaptation will focus on the youngest generation through Smrithi, a young woman living in London, who is disconnected from her culture and long-held family secrets. I have been working with the team over email and was fortunate to go to London in January 2020 with Karen Radzyner from Dragonet, to work with Olivia and Claire Mundell from Synchronicity in developing the adaptation. The team has created a compelling overview of the series which is now being pitched for development funding.

BH: A final question about the process of your writing. I was wondering how you gather and develop ideas. Do you simply type them into your computer? Or do you prefer to keep a notebook where you can jot down notes or map out more complex ideas like the intricate web of family relations in Song of the Sun God?

SC: I make notes of interesting ideas or scenes—sometimes a scene will just flash into my mind—or words. I love words. I have a notebook where all of this just gets dumped but sometimes I will put up a file on my computer where I collect ideas for future books. I keep this document secret somewhere in my computer because I think my husband would be terrified to see it—“What? You haven’t finished with the third book?” But when I write, I write directly into the computer. For Song of the Sun God, I did do some writing on a notepad because my children were much younger then, and I often needed to sit in a doctor’s waiting room or one would have speech therapy, and for an hour or so, I would just handwrite scenes. But nowadays I write directly into a computer and I actually prefer it because it is very fast, and it allows me to check my word count. A good day of writing, though, is a day when I forget about the targets because I am absorbed into my world. And when I emerge from that world, I realize that in those few hours, I wrote 2,000 words. You know, that is a beautiful day. And there are days like that. They are a real joy, and I feel that they are good for me.