Shankari Chandran on telling Sri Lankan stories in 'Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens'

After being told her work "wasn't Australian enough" to get published, author Shankari Chandran was thrilled when her novel 'Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens' won Australia's top literary prize, the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award. The author sits down with Sarah Malik in this first episode of The SBS Book Club podcast.

Winner of the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Shankari Chandran poses for a portrait with her novel ‘Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens’. Source: AAP / Bianca De Marchi

Shankari Chandran's novel Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens was almost never published.

It felt really rewarding and vindicating… that a novel that essentially is a love letter to Australia and simultaneously critiques some of its deeper darker issues around race was awarded the Miles Franklin literary award.

Shankari Chandran

Chandran's first novel Song of the Sun God followed a Sri Lankan family across three generations. Australian publishers deemed it 'not Australian enough' and it was picked up in Sri Lanka.

In her second book, The Barrier, she changed her protagonist from South Asian to white in order to get published in the Australian market.

Chandran couldn't find a publisher for her third manuscript, and resigned herself to the fact that her next work, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, might remain unpublished.

There’s a certain amount of grief in letting go of that dream. And at the same time it was very liberating because I could then write with a level of candour and honesty and directness that I perhaps have not had in the past.

Shankari Chandran

Set in a western Sydney nursing home, Chai Time intersperses residents' flashbacks from the Sri Lankan civil war with a contemporary racism row. A destroyed statue of James Cook reveals an undercurrent of tension that nursing home founder Maya and her daughter are forced to navigate.

The book explores culture wars, the stories we tell ourselves as a nation, and how histories are defined by the victors.

Chandran says she hopes that readers will see themselves in the character of Gareth, an every-man.

I know Gareth. Gareth comes to dinner. Gareth coaches my kids football team. Gareth makes jokes and I let the jokes go through to the keeper because I just don't want to make a fuss.... I want the reader to realise that every one of us has a bit of Gareth inside us. We are capable of this bigotry. The question is… Do we try to change it?

Shankari Chandran

Listen to The SBS Book Club in the SBS Audio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

CREDITS 

Executive producer and host: Sarah Malik

Sound engineer: Micky Grossman