Inspired by ‘delicious pickle of people’
Shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize for the second year running, Ciara Mandulee Mendis’s latest collection is inspired by relationships you build with people you meet by chance
Everything is grist to the mill when it comes to Ciara Mandulee Mendis. She is in no danger of running out of ideas, finding myriad flavours in what she calls the ‘delicious pickle of people’ the island is blessed with.
Ciara Mandulee Mendis
Now shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize for the second year running, Ciara has certainly gathered much since The Red Brick Wall which was her last shortlisted work. She has since been published in the Riptide Journal (UK), Southeast Asian Review of English (Malaysia), Midway Journal (USA), Indian Review (India) and Monograph (India), and is awaiting her stories to add their Sri Lankan incandescence to the Queen’s Quarterly (Canada) and the Bombay Review (India).
Another of her stories won the Editor’s Choice award in the Anthology of Short Stories: Spring 2022 published by Fenechty Publishing, UK.
Her stories are the narratives hidden within the “random but interesting people you and I pass by, or sometimes smile with but never stop to listen to”.
There is for instance “the woman who spends her day sitting on a bench in Viharamahadevi Park watching people”, or “a writer whose protagonist pays her a petrifying visit”.
“The collection is about the system we live in, and everything that’s wrong with it, and about the people who collide with it on a daily basis. ”
Ciara thinks everyone has stories within them, which they would share if you bother to listen to them.
The stories probe issues that press heavily on the Sri Lankan psyche: politics of gender, language and ethnicity, and the corrupt system. She does not start with a theme in mind, but sets about to write about the things she feels strongly about, so it materializes at the heart of the story.
“I don’t believe that just because you write, you get to show people the right and wrong. I don’t like to romanticize what I do. So, I think I can only express what they strongly feel about through writing, hoping that there will be a conversation about things that matter, in the society.”
When she was shortlisted for the 2020 Award, Ciara was an Assistant Director at the Department of Cultural Affairs, but has now joined the Prime Minister’s Office as an Assistant Secretary. Finding time to write was difficult as a result but “again I can’t complain because I have drawn heavily on my experience as an Officer of Sri Lanka Administrative Service, working with
interesting people from all walks of life.”
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