Ashok Ferrey- in his fifth shortlisting - has won the Gratiaen Prize 2021.  “This victory tinged with a little sadness,” he said in his acceptance speech, “I can no longer use my tagline, always a bridesmaid, never the bride!”. Ferrey won the prize for his latest book ‘The Unmarriageable Man’,  a somewhat autobiographical novel about young Sri Lankans in 1980s London overlaid with the subject of grief. The judges commended the novel as one that ‘displays the advanced craft of a writer working at his peak’.

Congratulations on winning the Gratiaen Award – well deserved! What went through your mind when your name was called?
- “Surely they got it wrong!” I thought. I’ve been there so many times – nominated 8 times in the literary world, once in the architectural (for that last Geoffrey Bawa Award): you know in your heart of hearts you don’t have a chance in hell of winning (but there’s no harm hoping, is there?). So you get ready for the cameras with that smile, the one that says how happy you are that someone else has won. Well, this time the joke was on me. I’m still in a daze. . .

In your acceptance speech, you jokingly said you can finally let go of your title of ‘always the bridesmaid, never the bride’. You’ve been shortlisted five times for the award – how does it feel, in your own words, to at last be the bride?
- You know, I still have a soft spot for that bridesmaid’s job position? There’s no pressure on bridesmaids, no scrutiny. Or maybe I’m that quintessential unmarriageable man. There’s this great danger when you become a bride that your head will get so swollen it won’t fit through the church doors. I’m currently watching my head closely.

How did The Unmarriageable Man come about? Did you ever look at it and think ‘yep, this is the one’?
- It is still a miracle to me how a book begins in the head, and how it then goes on to creates itself – like a new leaf unfurling under your eyes even though you never actually see it happen. You the author are only the medium. Your job is to hold on to that rogue pen while the book writes itself: it’s almost a danger to be too conscious, to think too much. But one thing is for sure. When you finish, you always think: ‘This is positively the worst book I ever wrote.’ This one was no exception.

In an interview, you mentioned that the book is your most autobiographical book to date and that you wrote it purely as a catharsis for your own issues?
- I can’t speak for other authors, but for me, every book cleans me out. It’s better than Milk of Magnesia I assure you. Once you finish, you really feel you have laid that particular ghost to rest; you never want to visit that subject again – even if you’ve left some things unsaid. 

Because it’s such a personal body of work, did it feel more rewarding to be awarded the Gratiaen for it?
- Yes, absolutely! Writing so personal a book is like washing your dirty linen in public. So when someone compliments you on the quality of your dirt, it is particularly gratifying.

You’ve been a judge, contender, and now a winner at the Gratiaen. What does the Gratiaen Award mean for writers in Sri Lanka?
- It is, quite simply, the ONLY port of entry for any English writer in Sri Lanka. It is the benchmark, the gold standard. However much we criticize it – and God how we love to! – in our hearts, we yearn for the recognition it gives.

You are a prolific writer and you’ve always maintained that you shouldn’t write just to play to the gallery. But your books have enjoyed commercial success. What do readers tell you about your work?
-I find that my books alternate: between frothy ‘light’ ones (which nevertheless contain a sediment of seriousness), and dour gloomy ones (which in spite of themselves contain a fair dollop of froth). Over the years I’ve discovered that readers either love the one type or the other. This actually tells me more about them than the book.

I think I’m lucky that my books seem to occupy that strange space between literary and commercial fiction, falling to one side or other of an invisible line. After twenty-five years you know what will appeal to your readers. The trick is to resist the temptation to push your work too far in that direction: you must only write what your heart tells you to write at this moment: not what your brain told you to write in the morning when you sat down to put pencil to paper. This current book, for instance, will not appeal to too many readers. Tough. It expresses the truth of me. If this is unpalatable, so be it.

It’s not easy to write a book that’s woven in the little intricacies and anecdotes of the culture of Sri Lanka that speaks so easily to readers who are ignorant of the same – yet you do. How?
- When I wrote my first book, Colpetty People, I didn’t realize I was expressing the culture or intricacies of Sri Lankan life. Nobody was more surprised than I when I was told that this is what I was doing. Here again you have the miracle of writing: you just write a plain old story, to please yourself; you then find, against all odds, that it means so much more, to so many different people. But you have to resign yourself to the fact that no one person will ever understand everything you write: I sometimes put in private jokes only I will ever understand – I don’t know why I do this, but it pleases me. The worst thing you can do is to try to be too accessible, to pander, to explain too much. The reader doesn’t like being taken for a fool. Even if he doesn’t understand your nuances or is not convinced of your truths, he will quite willingly suspend his disbelief and follow you; because he trusts you.

The Unmarriageable Man won the Gratiaen; does it now naturally hold the place as your best work yet or personally? 
- No, no nothing like that. They’re all my children – I hate them all equally.

What’s in the works for you right now? 
I’m currently in full builder mode, restoring an old house in Kandy!