Background
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LP8OZA6/?tag=2022091-20
( An evocative coming-of-age novel about growing up gay i...)
An evocative coming-of-age novel about growing up gay in Sri Lanka during the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict—one of the country’s most turbulent and deadly periods. Arjie is “funny.” The second son of a privileged family in Sri Lanka, he prefers staging make-believe wedding pageants with his female cousins to battling balls with the other boys. When his parents discover his innocent pastime, Arjie is forced to abandon his idyllic childhood games and adopt the rigid rules of an adult world. Bewildered by his incipient sexual awakening, mortified by the bloody Tamil-Sinhalese conflicts that threaten to tear apart his homeland, Arjie painfully grows toward manhood and an understanding of his own “different” identity. Refreshing, raw, and poignant, Funny Boy is an exquisitely written, compassionate tale of a boy’s coming-of-age that quietly confounds expectations of love, family, and country as it delivers the powerful message of staying true to one’s self no matter the obstacles.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062392980/?tag=2022091-20
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 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 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. 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
He published a young adult novel, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, in 2005.
He was a contributor to TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 1. In 2013, he released a fourth novel, In 2013 Shyam"s Funny Boy was included in the syllabus under marginalized study and gay literature of the under graduation English Department of The American College in Madurai.
Swimming won the Lambda Literary Award in the Children"s and Youth Literature category in 2006. In 2014, Shyam was presented the Bonham Centre Award from The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto, for his contributions to the advancement and education of issues around sexual identification.
( An evocative coming-of-age novel about growing up gay i...)
