Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy

Neluka Silva (University of Colombo)

Ed. by John Thieme, University of East Anglia
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.1.2: Canadian Writing and Culture (Anglophone): The Twentieth Century and beyond, 1900-present.
Vol. editors: Sarah Henzi (Simon Fraser University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1994

Places

Sri Lanka (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

Shyam Selvadurai was born in 1965 in Sri Lanka and moved with his family to Toronto, Canada in 1984.

Funny Boy

is Selvadurai's first novel. It is set in Sri Lanka, and is constructed in the form of six beautifully rendered stories about a boy growing up within an extended upper-middle-class Tamil family in Colombo during the seven years leading up to the 1983 riots, when he and his family sleep in their shoes so they can flee from the Sinhalese mobs. When Selvadurai's

Funny Boy

was published in 1994, it was hailed as one of the most powerful renditions of the trauma of the prevailing ethnic tensions in contemporary Sri Lanka. Selvadurai brings together the struggles of class, ethnicity and sexuality. These issues are discussed through the development of the protagonist, a young boy,…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1335 words

Citation: Silva, Neluka. "Funny Boy". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 July 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=12385, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy

Dates

Places

Genres and Modes

Resources

Save this article

Leave Feedback