Ondaatje, Karunatilaka and the Sigiri graffiti: Sri Lankan literature

About Ondaatje, Karunatilaka and the Sigiri graffiti: Sri Lankan literature

By the ULTIMATE Sri Lanka Editorial Team

Site Editor: Tara de la Motte

Sri Lanka has written poetry for well over a thousand years, in Sinhala, Tamil, Pali and, more recently, English, and its writers have won some of the world’s biggest prizes.

The Mirror Wall

On the polished Mirror Wall at Sigiriya, visitors scratched hundreds of short poems and comments, mostly between about the 8th and 10th centuries, many praising the painted women of the frescoes. Known as the Sigiri graffiti, they are among the oldest Sinhala writing to survive. Do not touch the wall: it is protected.

Michael Ondaatje

Born in Colombo in 1943, Michael Ondaatje wrote Running in the Family (1982), a playful memoir of his Burgher family in Ceylon, and won the Booker Prize in 1992, shared with Barry Unsworth, for The English Patient.

Twelve centuries ago, visitors to Sigiriya left poems on the wall about the painted maidens they had seen: the island’s first reviews.

Shehan Karunatilaka

Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker Prize in 2022 for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a darkly comic afterlife novel about a photographer who wakes up dead and has seven moons to solve the mystery of his own death. His earlier Chinaman, about a cricket-obsessed sportswriter, is a cult favourite.

Carl Muller

Carl Muller’s comic novels about the von Bloss family, a sprawling Burgher clan, beginning with The Jam Fruit Tree (1993), followed by Yakada Yaka and Once Upon a Tender Time, are loved for their humour and their picture of Burgher life.

Jean Arasanayagam

Jean Arasanayagam (1931–2019) wrote poetry and fiction about family, belonging and identity, drawing on her Burgher roots and her marriage into a Tamil family.

Reading list

Start with Running in the Family, The Jam Fruit Tree and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, and look for translations of Martin Wickramasinghe’s Gamperaliya.

Our advice: pack one Sri Lankan novel for the journey, and when you climb Sigiriya, stop at the Mirror Wall and imagine the visitors who wrote there more than a thousand years ago.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Ondaatje, Karunatilaka and the Sigiri graffiti: Sri Lankan literature before you go.