If we can see ourselves as being accountable to each other, if we can see ourselves as being connected to each other, we are much less likely to hurt each other.
“There is a sense of connection that exists between all of us,” Shankari Chandran tells me. It’s easy to lose sight of this. When the world around us grows far too wild and muddy, it’s fiction that illuminates that connection, cutting straight through the noise. The ability to take complex and uncomfortable realities and translate them into something digestible, compelling, and deeply human is one that Chandran has mastered.
Chandran’s novel Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens won the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award, an achievement that she describes as ‘rewarding and validating’ not just for herself, but for “every writer of colour”. She is also the author of The Barrier, Song of the Sun God, Safe Haven, and now, Unfinished Business. Much of Chandran’s work interrogates injustice and explores themes of identity and community — particularly within the context of the Sri Lankan civil war and through the voices of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora.
Chandran’s newest novel, Unfinished Business, is a riveting thriller that follows CIA Agent Ellie Harper as she investigates the murder of a Sri Lankan journalist. In a dressing room deep within the labyrinth of Carriageworks, I sat down with Chandran to chat about the book.
Alex: Thank you for Unfinished Business! It was my first foray into thriller — more specifically, spy fiction — and I really enjoyed it. Though I did want to ask, why a thriller?
Shankari: Because the thriller genre is a compelling one. I think it’s very easy to look away from, and become immune to, the atrocities that happened in far-off countries. I wanted to engage the reader in what had happened in Sri Lanka, which is a very forgotten and hidden war, and the ending to the war, as many wars and endings to war are. I thought that the thriller genre was the best way to do it.
A: Memory comes up a lot in your work. How do you ensure there’s care and respect when dealing with both your own stories and bringing those to light, but also the stories of others?
S: I’m definitely more concerned about the stories of others, because these are stories of people who are exceptionally brave and have survived terrible things. I will only use stories that people have offered to me with the intention of wanting to see them in a book.
I think one of the beautiful things about being Sri Lankan Tamil, and I’m sure this is true of any community, is that we are very connected to each other. There’s always just three degrees of separation. When I go to Sri Lanka, for example, people will know that I’m writing a book, and they will want to speak to me and offer me their stories of what happened during that time. I don’t approach survivors, ever.
The second thing that I do is approach human rights lawyers, activists, journalists, and politicians, because they are in the public space. Almost by virtue of their careers, they have a particular story, or narrative, that they want to put out into the world. So I feel comfortable going to them and saying, “I’m writing this novel. This is my particular approach. I would like to know the answers to these questions from your perspective. Are you comfortable giving them to me?”
The meeting I wanted but didn’t get was with a very senior person in police in Sri Lanka, and I imagine that he did not want to be interviewed by me, because he could have safely assumed that I would’ve asked him about the disappearances.
I’m always cognisant that I am working with the lived experiences of people who have been through extraordinary and terrible things, and that my job as a writer is to try to honour that experience as honestly and as respectfully as possible.
A: There is this wonderful conversation between your characters, Ameena and Sathyan, where Ameena explains why she is a journalist. She says:
“… I keep thinking that someone might read what I write. Someone with real power and they might do something about it. Because if you put it down in words, you hold people accountable for their sins. You might not be able to punish them; you might not be able to prevent it from happening again. But we are all of us accountable to each other.”
And it’s that point in particular I find really interesting. What does community mean to you in your novels?
S: It’s a really big question. Growing up, community meant my own Sri Lankan Tamil community, in particular the diaspora in Australia. As I got older and worked more deeply for years in social justice development and the strengthening of communities, I felt very strongly that if we can see ourselves as being accountable to each other, if we can see ourselves as being connected to each other, we are much less likely to hurt each other.
We will feel a sense of responsibility towards people we don’t know, as well as those that we do know. I tried to articulate that in my speech today, and I tried to articulate it in that book. There is a sense of connection that exists between all of us and it’s enriching for me to begin that sense of community with my own large extended family and to my own vibrant, ancestral community. But it is also more important that I use the skills of community and community building to then try to extend that outwards, and to see all people as being part of my community.
When my children were young, I used to try to brainwash them, and I would ask them, “What are you? Where are you from?” They were trained to answer, at that time, when they were young (now they no longer listen to me), that they are Australian Tamil, which is our ethnicity. We live in Australia; Australia is our home. So they’re Australian Tamil, and they’re trying to be responsible citizens in a global community, because I wanted them to really think about that: what does it mean to be a responsible citizen of, and in, a global community?
A: In the acknowledgments for Unfinished Business, you thank Radhiah Chowdhury at Audible for “encouraging me to release Ellie from the white woman I thought she had to be when I first wrote her in 2016.” Ellie, being both white and Sri Lankan Tamil, grapples with her identity. I wanted to know, has writing changed your understanding of self?
S: Yes, absolutely. I feel my entire life — and we use the word ‘journey’ so much that it starts to become meaningless — but I feel like my entire life is a journey. As a Hindu, my entire life is in fact a journey according to the doctrine.
But I feel, as I’ve gotten older, increasingly comfortable. Writing is what has enabled me to feel comfortable with my sense of self and with the contradictions and the inadequacies and the strengths of that identity.
I am so proud to be Australian. It is a complex experiment, a settler colony like Australia, and a multicultural project at that. It is a complex and ongoing experiment, and I’m proud to be a part of it. I’m also proud to be a Sri Lankan Tamil, of ancestry and of cultural experience. And I am so proud — or rather, so relieved actually, pride is not the right word in this context — relieved that my upbringing and my work as a lawyer in the social justice field have enabled me to see an identity, or a way of connecting my identity, to that of others.
And that is both in order to find similarities, but also to accept difference, and to feel a sense of enrichment, rather than fear, around that difference. I think, as I’ve gotten older, and through the process of writing, I’ve now probably written a million words on what is fundamentally identity; that process has enabled me, somewhat therapeutically, to come to terms with myself.
A: In an interview, you said that Australia is still “grappling with its colonial history”. There’s a lot of shame there, and it feels that as a country we don’t know how to move forward. The manuscript for your novel Song of the Sun God was rejected for “not being Australian enough”. That’s quite jarring.
S: Yeah, it is jarring, isn’t it? It felt incredibly validating to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award, which is intended for a novel that reflects Australian life in any of its stages. It was incredibly rewarding and validating to receive that, and not just for me personally, but for every writer of colour, every person of colour who has read that book and said, gosh, that’s exactly what I feel, or very close to it. And for others who have said, I feel that, but didn’t know that we were allowed to say it out loud. I feel that win of the Miles Franklin was a really big team win. It felt like a very collective win. It felt like the whole village, the ‘Global Village’, won that prize that day, and that was a really good feeling.
A: You’ve said that when you were writing Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens you had abandoned hope of being published. You were writing freely without the constraints of the publishing industry. How has winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award affected your writing practice now that you know you’re being published and have an audience?
S: I think it has helped me enormously to write with far greater confidence and clarity around the things that I want to say. Within the opening chapters of my new novel, you know exactly what it’s about and exactly what I’m intending you to reflect on, as uncomfortable as the ideas in my next novel are, and that’s good.
I feel a lot more confident about it, and I feel a strong sense of purpose around why I write and what I write about. I’ve said to Robert, my publisher, [that] if my work isn’t good enough, then you shouldn’t publish it. I don’t want to sit on the shelves alongside Nardi Simpson unless I deserve to be there. I’m up for the hard work and the challenge of improving what I produce. Either way, I will continue to write very firmly in the ideas and purpose of my writing.
From a commercial perspective, my other life is that I work in a large corporation and I was previously at a large international law firm and I’ve learnt the numbers game; I understand the need for a business case. So at some point in the future, my sales [department] may tell people senior to my publisher that I should no longer be published, and such is the world we live in. But I will still feel very grateful for the opportunity to have published at all and for the daily opportunity to write.
A: I was particularly interested in your background as a lawyer.
S: I do enjoy, strangely, the culture of law firms and perhaps more importantly lawyers. My favourite clients when I was running a pro bono program were always the legal not-for-profits. I sit in a fancy law firm in a glass tower and have an expense account, whereas they’re doing all the things and they’re very brave to do that, particularly in countries like Sri Lanka. There was a time when they were always looking over their shoulder, Lasantha Wickrematunge was shot on the way to work. They’re extremely brave to do what they do. I like and respect and admire enormously their commitment.
A: In an interview with the Sydney Writers Festival last year, you said that “justice must be delivered by the justice institutions”. What happens when institutions fail, as they often do in Unfinished Business? Where do you think fiction takes us when those institutions encounter limitations?
S: I feel like I work in concert with other people. I feel like I’m part of a team, even though the team doesn’t really know that we’re all on the same team together necessarily. Where we are working on the same issue of trying to reveal injustice and to pursue justice from different sides and in different ways using different forums and tools.
For me, at the moment, that tool of choice is fiction. What I think fiction can do is reach an audience that is not engaged in human rights organisations or human rights reports. For many people, myself included, there are times when I would rather switch from ABC News to Netflix quite happily, because it is so much easier to bear. At the same time, novels connect with us and are compelling; and thrillers are, you know, you’ve got to keep going and turn those pages and find out who-done-it and why. Even if that means you’re up at 2 am when you know you shouldn’t be.
That’s where I think the novel has a really important role to play in creating that connection, in revealing the truth in that way, in enabling and supporting people to feel something very powerful. If only one of those people is someone that has real power in the world, then that is a win. Any of us writing in this space will take that win.
A: Unfinished Business takes complex ideas in international law and global politics and makes them understandable and digestible to a reader. Admittedly, I didn’t know much about China’s Belt and Road Initiative until I came across it in your novel.
S: Bear in mind, I wrote that book eight years ago — so I wrote it in 2016. At the time, I remember reading articles and academic papers on China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It often felt like a lot of that insight was captive within universities and think tanks. So I was thinking, “How is this not in the mainstream enough, and why aren’t we writing about it and talking about it more — beyond the sort of verified circles of academia, a few policy organisations, and a few politicians, but not many?”
South Asia was growing in its own awareness of those issues because it’s in South Asia, but the West, I think, was not alive to it until it was already well on its way. Again, it falls to journalists and to writers, to poets, to anyone who can work with words, to try to bring those stories to the front.
A: Finally, given that Honi is a university paper, I was wondering whether you had some recommended readings for us?
S: At the moment, I’m on an absolute bender of Percival Everett, who I find to be just so politically charged in such a funny, clever way that you don’t realise you’re being schooled in racial politics.
I’m also on a bender of Yumna Kassab, who’s been recently long-listed for the Miles Franklin Literary Award; her style of writing is mind-blowingly innovative. It’s really intellectually challenging. She assumes that you are clever, and I love that. I love being presented with work by an author that assumes I’m clever. She challenges you to rise to her level, and then she speaks and thinks very deeply about issues of politics, justice, and power.
So those would be my two top picks.
Shankari Chandran spoke at the Sydney Writers Festival on Thursday 22nd May and Friday 23rd May. Shankari’s newest novel, Unfinished Business, is out on shelves now; visit her website for more information.
