One of the most significant developments in the past two or three decades has been the breathtaking rapidity with which the world has begun to shrink. Even the remotest part of the world is interconnected in unprecedented ways with the rest of the world in ways that could scarcely have been imagined thirty years ago. We are living at a moment in history when the global and the local are co-implicated in complex and unanticipated ways creating newer and more complicated transnational subjectivities that are fragmented and fissured and constantly on the move. As a consequence of the phenomenal growth and spread of science, technology, mass media, international travel, migration and so on the world is contracting as never before. And, this very contraction, paradoxically enough, Ins the effect of focusing more closely on questions of, to use James Clifford's terminology, 'roots' and 'routes' and problematics of cultural citizenship.
� Wimal Dissanayake 1998

Read more about Writers in Exile

Sunil Govinnage's writings are primaraly about fringe migrants in Australia: "The stories gathered in this volume display a literary imagination of high order wedded to a probing mind that should command our attention. A Sri Lankan born black Australian visits Amsterdam only to be confronted by the ambivalences and complexities of his identity; a Sri Lankan family arrives in Perth, their new home, as what it is to be here is constantly and disconcertingly being juxtaposed in the narrator's mind with-what it was to be there-, a newly arrived immigrant father, through the experiences of his daughter, faces up to the realities of racism and the attractions of his new home; a husband is caught between the power of nostalgia and the material comforts of the present; a father and son go out looking for ice cream as they encounter the inescapable ramifications of multiculturality in Australia. It is through situations such as these that Sunil Govinnage has sought to focus attention on the complexities of diasporic existence and the desire to map the variable meanings of home and exile."

These stories will be included in his first anothology of short stories, titled "Black Swans and Other Stories" to be published in February/March 1999.

Site Design � Sunili Govinnage 1998