We live in an era of unprecedented access to information, yet power and authority often present fiction as fact.
As a writer and lawyer, Shankari Chandran recognises fiction’s limitations in delivering justice. But her interviews with survivors of Sri Lankan genocide inform her novels, which provide a powerful opportunity to explore and reveal stories, history, war and injustice. Fiction is a crucial space for truth-telling, especially when official channels are blocked.
In this lecture, delivered at the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival, hear the Miles Franklin Literary Award winner speak to her use of fiction as a living, communal archive.
I’d like to Acknowledge the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation and recognise their deep connection to Country that is more than 60,000 years old and continues to this day. I am grateful to be on this Country. I pay my respect to their Elders and Storytellers past and present and extend that respect to any First Nations People who are here.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for coming and thank you to PEN Sydney and the Sydney Writers’ Festival for having me.
To PEN in particular — your work defending freedom of expression, and the safety of writers and journalists has never been more important.
Today, I want to play with two ideas about THE BOOK:
- The first, is the idea of: The Book as Truth-Telling in the Age of Endless Injustice – this will form PART 1 of my talk
- The second idea is: The Book as Conversation in the Age of Endless Shouting – this will form PART 2.
LET’S BEGIN WITH PART 1 AND THE FIRST IDEA: THE BOOK AS TRUTH-TELLING IN THE AGE OF INJUSTICE.
On 8 January 2009, Lasantha Wickrematunge, a Sri Lankan journalist, left his home in Colombo. As the founder of the newspaper, The Sunday Leader, he was known for fearless reporting — exposing human rights violations and corruption across ethnic and political lines.
Lasantha never made it to the office.
Four assailants on motorcycles blocked his car, smashed his windows, and shot him. He died in hospital.
Shortly after his death, The Sunday Leader published the obituary Lasantha had written for himself. In it, he wrote:
“No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism…”
He spoke directly to then-President Mahinda Rajapaksa — his lifelong friend — saying:
“When finally, I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.”
Despite tireless campaigning by his family and international pressure, Lasantha’s killers — who were military personnel and government officials — have never been brought to justice.
His name joins a long list of journalists killed for speaking the truth. PEN International reports that 2024 was a particularly brutal year: 122 journalists killed worldwide. A 30% increase in journalists imprisoned.
When I read about Lasantha’s assassination in 2009, Sri Lanka’s civil war was entering its final stage — one in which tens of thousands of Tamil civilians would be killed.
For years after, I would think about the children that died in the jungle, the bodies and the truth that would be buried with them. I would think about Lasantha and so many like him.
Eventually, I turned those thoughts into a novel — Unfinished Business — in which a journalist is murdered while investigating a government committing genocide against its own people: a minority ethnic group fighting for the return of a homeland, its borders redrawn by the British. A people used as human shields by their own militia. A government using Chinese weapons and American satellites.
It is an ancient and recurring story. Some might say a classic — not a bestseller, but a classic for our species.
I became a lawyer because I believed in the power of the law to deliver justice.
I was young. So young.
I had the audacity to expect that the law would protect and empower the marginalised, it would redress wrongs, and it would transform societies.
On some days, I think of Human Rights conventions as an elegy for the Human Race; they articulate who we thought we could have been to each other, but the possibility is recently deceased and all we are left with are international treaties that form an empty ode to our failed ambition.
To many people here – not just those who have family in Gaza, Israel, DRC, Sudan and so many other parts of the world ravaged by war and Empire – Human Rights Conventions read like a wish-list of flouted ideals, with no understanding of human brutality OR our voracious hunger for power, land and resources.
The law is a promise, broken again and again — and some people pay the price more than others.
BUT on better, more hopeful days, I remember that Human Rights Conventions are clear and clever expressions of our aspiration to be our best selves — because we know how easily we can become our worst selves.
When I re-read human rights conventions, I feel them in my body. They sing with poetry. They whisper like the sound of my children breathing in their sleep.
They scream with the rage and grief of parents demanding to know where their children are buried.
I hear their scream even here in this industrial chic building that doesn’t need a Red Cross painted on its roof, where I am safe on gentrified real estate that is on unceded, ancient and recently stolen territory, that at least presently adheres to more of the rule of law than the place my family left behind.
I hear their scream. But justice seems a distant concern – one we erase, ignore, and forget.
I’ve often argued that fiction does not create justice. Only THE LAW can do that, through courts, governments, and the people who vote for them. Fiction offers no comfort to survivors. The dead remain dead. The living carry the trauma of war, injustice and loss forever.
What fiction can do — what it must do — is create a space for truth-telling that is immediate and intimate.
We will not stop a horror if we can’t SEE it.
We will not care enough to say STOP, if we can’t feel it.
I want to read — and write — fiction that interrogates the injustices that enrage me. That fill me with grief for another person, known or unknown. I invite that rage and that grief. I want my readers to feel it too.
I want FICTION to work in concert with just laws, ethical leaders, heroic citizens, and responsible media. I want fiction to help reveal the truth. To help record it.
I know I want a lot – and that you want it too.
FICTION lives and works in an ecosystem of people who are trying to make justice:
- Easier to understand
- Easier to defend
- Impossible to ignore and
- Impossible to hide.
Over the last 11 years, i’ve visited SRI LANKA’s former war zone and interviewed genocide survivors, journalists, activists, and lawyers — people who risk their lives to speak about what happened. To demand that it never happens again.
The hardest interview was with a DOCTOR who stayed with thousands of refugees during the final months and days of the war.
He amputated limbs without anaesthetic. He used torn clothing for bandages; and he stepped over the dead to protect the living.
He told me, “In Sri Lanka, we are not allowed to speak the truth about what happened. And without the truth, there can be no healing.”
He said: “Fiction is an important way of telling the truth.”
So let me tell you a story – a truth? – and you tell me if it sounds familiar.
If it hurts.
If it enrages you – inside your body:
On 18 May, 2009, Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war ended on a tiny strip of land at the far north-east corner of the island. During the last months of the war, it is believed that more than 70,000 people died – mostly unarmed non-combatants.
Trapped and then crushed in the middle of a conflict that had long since left the constraints of morality and the fiction of international law behind; these people were mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and children. Many disappeared, their bodies never found. All of them were loved.
A few months before the war’s end, all international ngos and journalists had been ordered to leave Sri Lanka’s warzone for their own safety. The passage of food, water and medicine was stopped. The Sri Lankan government designated No Fire Zones within the warzone and asked Tamil civilians to take shelter there. The Tamil Tigers also took shelter in there, deliberately hiding amongst their own people.
What happened next was revealed through:
- The mobile phone footage civilians took of bombs falling on the No Fire Zones;
- The footage Sri Lankan soldiers took of prisoner executions; and
- The testimony of survivors of torture, rape and mass killings by the Sri Lankan Army.
Testimony that the Tamil Tigers forced their own people to fight and shot them when they refused.
Testimony that the No Fire Zones were the deliberate targets of the Sri Lankan Army, not collateral damage.
Entire villages, communities and families were devastated. Erased.
Reports were issued by human rights organisations, and the actions of the Sri Lankan Government, the Army and the Tamil Tigers were rightly condemned. But there were no trials, no convictions, and no justice.
Only mass graves and platitudes of peace, truth-telling and reconciliation. Only Tamil and Sinhala families – two warring ethnic groups of one small region – who will carry their grief and trauma forever.
Sixteen years after the war ended, there are grandmothers and mothers who still stand outside government buildings, holding photographs of their children, demanding to know what happened to them.
The story that was told inside Sri Lanka about how the war ended, was vastly different. National news outlets dismissed UN reports of Government and Army atrocities as Western propaganda.
The conflict was largely reported as an ethnic war for land, with little understanding of the impact of colonisation, Imperial revisionist cartography or the yearning for homeland and safety that both ethnic groups felt certain they could justify and kill for.
The complexities of the stories that breathed and were buried in the red earth of my parents’ homeland were reduced to short-lived headlines, ignored human rights reports and incomplete renditions of The Truth. This is the story that the World learned and then forgot.
For the first time in decades, Sri Lanka is taking small steps towards political recovery. Even as I say these words, I’m afraid that the planet Saturn will alter its orbit and scupper our tentative hope. I need to spit three times and I urge every Sri Lankan here to do the same.
Replace the name Sri Lanka with: Gaza, Israel, Sudan – the list goes on and on and the list is not fully known. It’s a story that many of us here have told so many times.
And I’ve been asked, why don’t we let it go? Are we, as Sri Lankan writers trapped in a genre of our own making, condemned to re-litigate the past through literature?
The short answer is: Because we humans never ever stop doing this.
When I write about Sri Lanka, I expect the reader to reflect on Sri Lanka, AND the similarities with too many other countries in the world. I want US to learn from US.
If history, and ‘the truth’ is told by the victors, by the most powerful and the most vocal, then literature must do more. It must do better.
If for some, the news is too easy to turn away from, all of us here know how hard it is to put down a great book.
And that’s why I write.
Sri Lanka’s war, led to our migration, to our creation of a new home and to the idea of our homeland.
Disconnected from the reality of this homeland, we recreated it through memory and storytelling. We remembered it. We imagined it and – because memory, imagination and storytelling can also be unreliable – we re-shaped it long after war prevented us from returning to it.
The war taught us that violence sits under the surface of polite society and that safety and stability are privileges that should never be taken for granted. It makes us grateful for these privileges, and vigilant about anything that could take them away.
MY ASK of the reader is to remember that this war is over, but WAR continues to rage around the world, and ALL wars are unjust; ALL wars have consequences for generations.
Our storytelling records the horrors of war – but also the strength of our people. It gives words to our families, our struggle, our flaws and our greatness.
Our storytelling gives this to our children, and it gives it to you. It often starts with the war, but it does not end there. It is an ongoing, rich and powerful story. It is many stories, and we are still writing them.
IN PART Two of this lecture I’D LIKE TO EXPLORE THE IDEA OF The Book as a Conversation, in the Age of Endless Shouting
Today, I’m at a writer’s festival surrounded by well-read people who largely agree with each other amidst intermittent accusations of:
- Racism, cancel culture
- Improper government intervention in the independence of artistic bodies
- The role of governments in funding artistic bodies and therefore the arts
- The use of taxpayers’ money to fund artists whose work may or may not contain messages we may or may not agree with or think appropriate for or worthy of public funding
- The importance of art as political protest
- The importance of artistic freedom, and
- The very meaning of art itself…
When I leave this literary lounge room, I am reminded that we have surrendered society to corporate control of political agendas, to technology, and now to the open ownership of the Techno-Bro Robber Barons.
Public discourse is a battleground of entrenched positions, where there is more shouting than listening, and where those that shout the loudest win. Those that do not have a voice, lose.
Arundhati Roy tells us:
“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
Public conversation has been hijacked by those who can afford the largest microphone; by people who would scare us about a metaphorical pendulum that has swung too far.
They are organised and powerful communicators who disguise their agendas in conversations about rights, and falsely tell us that rights are a zero-sum game; that creating opportunities and inclusion for the marginalised takes opportunities and inclusion away from more deserving people.
When these voices shout it feels almost impossible to speak and listen thoughtfully to the privileged few and the disaffected many that we may disagree with.
We have surrendered the truth to people who position themselves as free speech advocates, but who then only amplify voices that agree with them, who dismiss and potentially silence opposing views and undermine the open dialogue essential to free speech. And in case I am not clear enough, it is easy to criticise this behaviour in others, but not recognise it in ourselves.
Controlling communication platforms, under the guise of stopping censorship, only to flood those platforms with hate-speech, once seemed like something out of a dystopic novel, and yet we are growing used this being – not a novel – but being the norm.
Words like misinformation and disinformation have become as meaningless as the word truth itself because we can no longer recognise the difference.
The institutions and mechanisms we once trusted to protect or elevate the truth are now overwhelmed, unable to withstand the relentless influence of invisible algorithms that dictate what information we see and what remains hidden from us.
We are gradually losing our ability to critically examine and question the information we receive. We are no longer pushing ourselves to interrogate sources or to think more deeply about the information we encounter.
In an age where freedom of speech has been corrupted into the freedom to say anything – and indeed a willingness to believe anything – we are paying the price for the freedom of speech with the loss of truth.
If THE TRUTH is essential for the informed conversations that are the foundation of: public debate, policy development, law reform, equitable and accountable government spending, campaign funding transparency, procedurally fair elections, just outcomes, and therefore a just society, and the TRUTH is in peril, then so is all of the above.
I find myself channelling my father and pondering the different ages of different civilisations when apparently people were open to debate + disagreement–when they were capable of it:
- The Hindu tradition, where in the temples, debates on theology and science were a regular occurrence, and people showed up to spectate. The loser of the debate became the student of the winner, and they agreed to learn more.
- The Talmudic tradition of critical discussion, where the skills of argumentation and analysis were so deeply rooted, they were considered a cultural practice. AND
- The Islamic tradition of original interpretation, where the practice of independent reasoning formed the foundation of scholarly debates across theology, science, and philosophy.
These cultures fostered differing perspectives and dynamic exchanges of ideas – words that almost seem like a different language from another time if not another universe.
How will we return to this form of CONVERSATION, that is curious instead of simply combative?
When confirmation bias and algorithms often drive what we’re reading and therefore how we engage with discourse, we are drawn deeper into silos that create polarisation rather than connection.
How will we come to a place of compromise or consensus, if we cannot first have an informed conversation?
We live in an era of unprecedented access to information, to “the truth”. And yet power and authority often present fiction as fact. In such times then, LITERATURE must present facts through fiction.
As Aldous Huxley says, facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
FICTION has become an essential and disruptive vehicle for truth and an important place of [public] conversation. I don’t need to Shankari-splain the importance of books to people who are attending a writers’ festival.
But I do need to remind myself that THE BOOK is a powerful form of conversation at a time when we are losing the ability to speak to the people we disagree with in a manner that is respectful and truthful.
BOOKS are no longer just a form of creative escape, intellectual exploration, social commentary and entertainment.
If that wasn’t challenging enough, NOW, they must deliberately do more. THE BOOK must work hard, and therefore THE WRITER must work harder to tell the truth and to tell the truth slowly because the truth takes time to unfold – it must not be reduced to fleeting soundbites or misleading headlines.
THE BOOK is a counterbalance to the fast-paced, reactive and reactionary nature of today’s communication.
It asks for your attention, and it affords the time required for understanding. It asserts confidently that real contemplation can’t be rushed.
THE WRITER must create safety in THE BOOK and then take THE READER into deep discomfort, where they can:
- Grapple with ideas that are conceptually complex and emotionally charged.
- Where they can engage with the ideas and evidence we’ve tried to ignore.
The writer does this by seeking the words. /By picking one word up to see if it works; /and if it doesn’t, then to put it down and try another. /To place these words in an order to help the reader understand what the writer is trying to say, even when the writer is not always saying it very well.
When THE WRITER crafts THE BOOK, and even when THE READER reads THE BOOK, ideas are tested and refined rather than dismissed outright or shouted over or cancelled into silence.
In writing, THE WRITER creates a sustained relationship between herself and THE READER; between story and meaning.
These conversations need quiet because the world and most people are so noisy, and I can’t think clearly when there’s too much noise. I can’t hear what I feel let alone speak what I feel.
These conversations in BOOKS allow me to pause, so I can acknowledge my anger and my grief and then I can control my raging mind and my grieving heart.
I can question whether my anger and grief, no matter how justified, how righteous, is leading me and those I love towards more anger and more grief.
I can ask: Is there another way?
These conversations challenge me to be curious – to ask questions and listen to answers with humility. They reward me with stories I never knew. Stories that make me laugh and cry, that make me ask more questions, that wake me up from a stupor that was forced on me, but one that I also wholeheartedly accepted for myself.
From our relative positions of privilege, we often resist genuine dialogue because it threatens our power. I know I do this – I resist challenge. But THE BOOK is a way to talk about frightening ideas. To sit in shame together. To question our complicity together. To be vulnerable together.
In this extraordinary place – THE BOOK – a place that stems our decline and exalts our potential for greatness and goodness, multiple conflicting viewpoints coexist, and everyone has space to breathe, time to explain themselves and opportunity to disagree; opportunity to change one’s mind.
THE CONVERSATION requires more listening than speaking. It is transformative.
And it is hard. Scrolling through my Instagram feed is much easier.
Public education and public activism are at risk of being reduced to what is posted on social media. I’m not saying that posting is futile but there are times when it is most certainly facile, it isn’t giving any of us the full story.
There is a version of myself that prefers moral outrage to factual interrogation of moral positions.
Outrage is easy. Initially, it’s energising, but then it’s draining, and it rarely moves me forward.
The better version of me wants to know more; is brave enough to be challenged; is good enough to challenge others respectfully.
The better version of me seeks connection with people not because they agree with me but because they are people. I am inherently tribal. I seek safety and comfort in similarity. But I am most often improved by people who are different.
THERE IS A REASON BOOKS ARE BANNED.
According to PEN America, in 2024 alone, there were 10,000 instances of book bans in the US.
Banned authors, Orwell, le Guin, Bradbury, Huxley, and Atwood – all at different times in history, spoke to a history that would repeat itself, and cross ethical boundaries in ways that were visible and invisible, barbaric but never unimaginable.
These writers of BOOKS spoke to anxieties that were contemporary in their time, and yet recurring and therefore, tragically timeless.
The same people who rail against censorship, silencing, and cancel culture, who opine with outrage about the right to freedom of speech, have the audacity to ban books that address topics such as freedom of speech, as well as race and sexual identity.
JAMES BALDWIN REMINDS US THAT:
“In order to talk to someone, you have to reveal yourself. You can’t talk at all unless you’re willing to reveal yourself.“
But such revelations are often ugly – they are hard to speak, and they are harder to hear.
The stakes of these conversations that we can have in books – but no longer have in the public space – are exceptionally high. You may not agree with my Conversations about Sri Lanka. You may not like them. But I’d like you to listen to a few of them.
CONVERSATION 1:
If I disagree with you and criticise what you’re saying or doing, am I ANTI-YOU or am I legitimately exercising my right to freedom of speech, to freedom of peaceful political protest?
AND: If I expect to be protected from hate-speech and racial vilification, am I also willing to accept those limitations on my right to speak and to protest?
Alternatively, if I remain silent, am I siding with the oppressor? Am I, too, committing a violence?
OR, if I sign the right petitions, share the right posts, and speak largely to the echo chamber that agrees with me, am I taking meaningful action against the oppressor – is this action better than no action?
OR is time better served by creating more art that takes time to create, time to understand and will live in the public consciousness for more time than the average social media post?
Do we value the artist’s freedom of expression more – or perhaps only – when they agree with us – condemning them to allegations of MORAL FAILURE when they disagree, instead of recognising their MORAL CURIOSITY because they want to know more?
This is ONE CONVERSATION, and I have four more to go. We can’t answer these questions in a tweet or even an essay so compelling that you won’t fall asleep during it.
CONVERSATION 2 ABOUT SRI LANKA:
In our region, where successive colonising powers have drawn self-serving national boundaries, is a two-state solution possible? What is required by both, for two states to exist? What is the meaning of territorial legitimacy and what is the legitimacy of any nation state?
CONVERSATION 3:
When a group of people have been dispossessed and scattered, when they are themselves the victims and survivors of genocide, when they are surrounded by people who seek to destroy them, is it so hard to understand why they would kill people to defend a homeland?
[Remember, I said understand, not excuse, and not justify.]
CONVERSATION 4:
This is a Conversation that brings even deeper discomfort for my people:
When freedom fighters, who have sworn to protect their people, hide amongst their people, who is responsible for the carnage that followed? And what matters more: who started it, who made it worse OR that it stops?
The second part of that conversation is this:
When our people seek shelter in hospitals, schools and places of prayer, trying to protect their children from pain and death and they are bombed, is it so hard to understand why they would kill people to defend a homeland?
[Remember, I said understand, not excuse, and not justify.]
And finally, Conversation 5:
In such circumstances, is peace ever possible? Is forgiveness? When will the killing end and if grief lasts a lifetime, does hatred last a lifetime too? How many lifetimes? And how many children?
Audre Lorde says, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
BOOKS agree, and further remind us:
- That we need to be vigilant because our freedoms are fragile and should be protected,
- That all rights come with responsibilities,
- That human beings require surprisingly little provocation to descend into violence,
- That the privileged rarely acknowledge their power and concede it to others even less,
- That people can actually forgive the people who murdered their children, and
- That people can be courageous, wise and strong when we least expect it.
These stories teach me the humility to say I was wrong, I didn’t know, I’m sorry, and I’m grateful the writer showed me another more truthful way.
THE BOOK HAS BEEN MANY THINGS TO ME IN MY LIFE, BUT MOST PROFOUNDLY TWO THINGS:
FIRSTLY, THE BOOK IS TRUTH-TELLING IN THE AGE OF ENDLESS INJUSTICE:
I can’t rewrite the wrongs of Sri Lanka that have been ignored, AND only the mechanisms of justice can deliver justice.
I can’t prosecute them, but I can record them.
I write to reckon with Sri Lanka’s war crimes the only way I have left, through fiction.
There are many writers here today, people I’m honoured to call friends, who do the same and much more.
SECONDLY, THE BOOK IS A CONVERSATION, IN THE AGE OF ENDLESS SHOUTING:
Toni Morrison would tell us that this age: “is precisely the time when artists go to work. [She says] There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. This is how civilizations heal.”
THE BOOK remains one of the few places where complexity is embraced rather than feared.
As we face a world increasingly dominated by unreliable, simplistic and damaging narratives, THE WRITING OF BOOKS, THE READER, THE WRITER and THE BOOK have never felt more powerful or more necessary.
Thank you for being here. AND TO ALL THE WRITERS IN THE ROOM, let’s go back to work.