Galle Lit Fest marches back to Fort after four-year absence

Chief Guest Maithree Wickremesinghe with Fairway Literary Encouragement Award winner Sajani Senanayake

By Shiran Illanperuma

The Fairway Galle Literary Festival (GLF) made a triumphant comeback last week with financial backing from title sponsors Fairway Holdings and an elaborate ‘Cultural Show’ performed by the Sri Lankan military at the expense of the Prime Minister’s Office.

The three-hour opening ceremony featuring regional Sinhalese dances by the army, air force and navy was executed with military precision. However, Fairway Holdings Chairman Hemaka de Alwis said that the show “almost didn’t happen” due to disputes with the local municipal council who allegedly demanded taxes from the free-to-attend event. 

Fairway Holdings stepped up to the plate this year with an investment of over Rs. 30 m into the operational costs of the festival. Festival Founder Geoffrey Dobbs said: “The title sponsors are fantastic, they’ve come up to the mark and paid the salaries of my staff for six months. If we’ve needed more money they’ve come up with that too.”

Dobbs went on to tell the Daily FT that Fairway’s stake in the Galle Literary Festival will continue for the next three years, overlapping with the completion of a massive property development project in Galle in 2017. The project includes the building of new apartments, hotels and restaurants by Fairway and is said to be worth around Rs. 500 m.

Meanwhile former sponsors HSBC reportedly did not return this year due to concerns over the political risks in backing Dobbs who had a falling out with the former regime in 2013. Dobbs was denied entry into the country for waving the lion flag upside down in retaliation to a similar incident with the British flag.

However Dobbs’ relations with the government seem to be on the mend as the festival enjoyed state backing for the first time in its history. Prime Minister Wickremesinghe could not attend the opening ceremony as scheduled but acknowledged Dobbs during a speech at the DSC award ceremony, quipping about the festival founder’s melodramatic stand-off with the government of the time.

Celebrating the long awaited return and broad basing of the event Dobbs said: “The Galle Literary festival hasn’t been held for four years. In some ways people didn’t think it would be held again. But it has and I hope it will continue to do so in the future.”

With events in Kandy and Galle now over, the GLF will complete its last leg in Jaffna on 23 and 24 January. De Alwis, commenting on Fairway’s backing of the festival stressed the importance of cultural enrichment in the post-war era.

”You can’t enjoy the dividends of peace if you are not culturally sophisticated,” he said, explaining that it was his idea to begin experimenting with expanding the scope of the festival. “The show needs to grow so I asked Dobbs to expand to Kandy and Jaffna this time around,” he said.

Tourists, literati and local elites rubbed elbows in the close quarters of Galle Fort over the balmy five days of the event. Participants included high profile literati including Anuradha Roy, Amitav Gosh, Sebastian Faulks, Fiona Shaw and Festival Curator Shyam Selvadurai.

The festival consisted of a series of free and paid events including Q and A panels, cooking classes, private dinners, film screenings and two award shows – the inaugural Fairway Literary Award and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature which was held for the first time in Sri Lanka.

Pix by Shiran Illanperuma

​Inaugural winners of Fairway National Literary Awards announced

Fairway Holdings presented the Fairway National Literary Awards at the FairwayGalle Literary Festival, for the first time this year. The award worth Rs. 500,000 was created by Fairway Holdings for Sri Lankan writers in the categories of Sinhala, Tamil and English.

In the Sinhala category, Sepali Mayadunne took home the prize for her book Maha Sami which judging panel member Dr. Sunil Wijesiriwardene commended for the masterful way in which it “reconstructed the language of the literati of the Kandyan period and in a very subtle manner reconstruct the life of those people”.

Sepali’s book Maha Sami was part of a shortlist of four Sinhala novels, which included Ran Karanduwa by Batuwangele Rahula, Mey Rahas Kaluwen by Kaushalya Kumarasinghe and Raja Saha Gathakaya by Visekesa Chadrasekaram, which received particular commendation from the judges for its authenticity.

In the English category meanwhile a tie was declared between authors Rizwana Morseth de Alwis and Avanthurai Santhan for their novels It’s Not In Our Stars and Rails Run Parallel respectively.

A representative from the English panel of judges said that the winners were selected “with the backdrop that a novel should engage, entertain and speak its own truth”. “It should not collapse into conservative thinking, tradition, religion or ideology,” he said.

The two winners in the English category were selected out of a shortlist of five novels that included Strange Fruit by Afdhel Aziz, The King and the Assassin by Visekesa Chandrasekaram and Sinhala Only by Manuka Wijesinghe.

Unfortunately the judges in the Tamil category declined to shortlist any of the submissions received citing the lack of a high literary standard. Panel members said that the works they received were heavily influenced by the popular culture and cinema of Tamil Nadu and were therefore not fit for a literary award.

Renowned academic and wife of the Prime Minister Maithree Wickremesinghe, who was Chief Guest at the event, presented trophies to the winners. In her speech, Wickremesinghe noted the surging volume of literature in Sri Lanka and the importance of promoting a literary culture.

“Fairway’s inclusive and farsighted vision and commitment to promote Sri Lankan literature - in fact to uniformly stimulate literature in all three languages - needs commendation,” she said.