by Shyam Selvadurai
Recommended by Christopher DiRaddo
The Amnesty International Book Club is pleased to announce our July/August title Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai. This title has been recommended by guest reader Christopher DiRaddo, with whom you will explore the novel and read beyond the book to learn more about LGBTI issues that Amnesty works hard to bring to light.
Set in the mannered, lush world of upper middle class Tamils in Sri Lanka, Funny Boy, though not autobiographical, draws on Selvadurai’s experience of being gay in Sri Lanka and growing up during the escalating violence between the Buddhist Sinhala majority and Hindu Tamil minority in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.
Arjie Chelvaratnam, at the age of 7, prefers dressing up in a sari and playing bride-bride with his girl cousins to cricket. When he is discovered by the adults engaging in this innocent fun, he is forced out of the world of the girls. A lonely outsider, he attaches himself to various sympathetic adults, whose own trajectories and dilemmas reveal to Arjie the difficulties of following one’s desires. As the novel progresses, the civil violence and tensions mount bringing devastating consequences to Arjie’s family and their sheltered world.
Click below to download the discussion guide.
About Christopher DiRaddo
Christopher DiRaddo is the author of The Geography of Pluto (Cormorant Books, 2014) and four short stories that have been published in anthologies by Arsenal Pulp Press, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning First Person Queer.
He is also the founder and host of The Violet Hour, a bi-monthly queer reading series that takes place in the off-hours of a strip club in Montreal’s gay village. Christopher got his start in community activism in 1998, running communications for Montreal’s Divers/Cité LGBTQ Pride Celebrations. He also co-hosted the weekly community radio show Queercorps on CKUT FM from 1997 to 2003. In 2016, Christopher joined the programming committee at Blue Metropolis to help curate, produce and host a series of events featuring LGBTQ writers at the annual literary festival.
About the Author
Shyam Selvadurai
Shyam Selvadurai was born in 1965 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He came to Canada with his family at the age of nineteen. He has studied creative writing and theatre, and has a B.F.A. from York University.
Funny Boy, his first novel, was published to immediate acclaim in 1994, was a national bestseller, and won the W. H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and, in the U.S., The Lambda Literary Award, and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Cinnamon Gardens, his second novel, was shortlisted for the Trillium Award. It has been published in the U.S., the U.K., India, and numerous countries in Europe.
Shyam Selvadurai lives in Toronto.
