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Sometimes you can wait for months, even years, for a story to turn up. You wait, sheltering by the side of a library, or at a bus stop where once you had taken a magical ride that changed your life, and peer into the failing light, desperately looking, hoping one will turn up before the light goes completely and it is too dark to see. You begin to wonder whether you just missed the last one. Maybe you no longer know what a story looks like and it has passed by without you recognizing it. You try to remember what a story is, what it was, what it meant. You panic because you can’t be sure what moved you most. What was that thing that lit up your life? Made you think it was all worthwhile. Just to read it was to make the day worthwhile. You look at a story you started to write and think, no, that can’t be it. Then, even that disappears like the invisible lemony ink of your childhood. You wonder why the clouds are moving across the sky. Or are they? You begin to wonder, does anyone write stories anymore? Are there any stories left in this world that is so gridlocked with the debris of instant gratification. You wonder whether you will ever see another story like the one you can’t remember that set you on this road on which you are now stranded.

And then something turns a corner and you see a story coming. Then another, and another, and another. You see a whole anthology bringing you a whole new world in one amazing parade. The relief is indescribable. The best thing you can do is to turn the page and read. Then, you will remember everything: why you write, why you read, why you are who you are.

Romesh Gunesekera

Romesh Gunesekera was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Britain in the early 1970s. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is the author of eight books of fiction. His novel Reef was shortlisted for the 1994 Man Booker Prize. His new collection of stories set in postwar Sri Lanka, Noontide Toll, was published by Granta in 2014 along with a twentieth-anniversary edition of Reef. Romesh is the Chair of the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.