Sri Lanka

Introduction

Ever since the publication of volume 17 (1982) of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, the Sri Lankan bibliographical listings would begin with information on the twelve volumes of The Sri Lanka National Bibliography which was brought out by the National Library Association of Sri Lanka. Several of the individual citations over the years were gleaned from this resource. However, only six volumes of the 2013 Sri Lanka National Bibliography were sent to the University of Peradeniya Library on 1 July 2014. The University of Peradeniya Library is deemed a deposit library to which all Sri Lankan publications are required to be sent by law. No further issues had been received by the deadline for this JCL bibliography issue. On enquiry, it was disclosed that (despite the legal requirement) the University library only receives The Sri Lanka National Bibliography by a process of “exchange” whereby a publication from the university is despatched to the National Library Association in return for the aforementioned bibliography. If the Peradeniya publication is not received at the other end, then despatch of The Sri Lanka National Bibliography is withheld. Although general information pertaining to the 2014 SLNB was secured via correspondence, it was regretfully not possible to include individual citations from the bibliography here, although many of these citations would have been brought in via other reference sources.

This review proper for 2014 must necessarily begin on a sad note, with reference to the demise of two significant people in the world of letters. Sita Kulatunga graduated from the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya in the halcyon days of the mid-fifties and then became an accomplished creative writer and translator. Kulatunga’s Dari: The Third Wife was on the shortlist of the inaugural Gratiaen Awards, won the Sri Lanka Arts Council Award for English Writing and ran into several re-prints since it was a prescribed text at several levels at school and university. Subsequently, High Chair and Cancer Days was also shortlisted for the Gratiaen and a third book, A Small Wedding, won the Godage National Literary Award. Sita Kulatunga translated a number of novels from English to Sinhala including Kamala Markandaya’s Some Inner Fury (Premaya Saha Kopagniya) and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (Premaye Unmadaya).

Later in the year, the English academe in Sri Lanka, Canada and elsewhere were shocked to learn of the demise of Chelva Kanaganayakam (another bilingual literary figure) soon after he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Kanaganayakam had his secondary education at Trinity College Kandy, read English for honours at the University of Kelaniya and completed his PhD on a Commonwealth scholarship at UBC. At the time of his demise he was Professor in English at the University of Toronto and had been on numerous occasions the Director of South Asian Studies. One of his proudest achievements was winning the Outstanding Teacher Award in the School of Arts and Science, University of Toronto in 1998-99. His major publications included: Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature; Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction; Lutesong and Lament: Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka; Dark Antonyms and Paradise: The Poetry of Rienzi Crusz; Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their World and Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose. Despite living several decades in Canada, he never severed his Sri Lankan connections. He edited Nethra which was the journal of the ICES, translated the Tamil novel Sadangu as Ritual for the Gratiaen Trust, and contributed regularly to Sri Lankan journals. In commenting on his demise, Linda Hutcheon, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto said, “the world has lost a great and gentle spirit”. The number of tributes listed in this bibliography alone would show what he meant to his friends, students and colleagues.

Vihanga Perera who had been previously shortlisted for his submissions The (IR) (AU) Topsy and Stable Horses finally won the 2014 Gratiaen Prize for his collection of poetry Love and Protest. The other contenders were Sandali Ash Rao’s Guide to Lime Pickling, Quintus G. Fernando Celibacy Factor, and Ayathurai Santhan Rails Run Parallel. All the shortlisted entries barring Celibacy Factor were in manuscript form. The judges this year comprised academic Dinali Fernando, theatre personality Jehan Aloysius and the famed author of Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala, who was also the Chair of the panel. On announcing Perera the winner, the Chair said, “It was a powerful collection of poetry dealing with the contemporary. The poems were distilled with nuance and clarity and they were expressive and uniquely Sri Lankan”. At the short list event the manuscript was commended “for a well-executed exploration of themes, for a work that is often bold and challenging, but consistently engaging, and for a commentary on current socio-political issues that is tempered with the personal themes of love and loss”. Ayathurai Santhan’s novel Rails Run Parallel was highly praised for its clear, simple storytelling with “excellent use of language and dialogue, and attention paid to the details of ordinary life in a situation far from ordinary.” The judges further considered it “an introspective account of many journeys for its ability to delve into the personal experience of dislocation, ethnicity and identity and for its use of detail and for the subtle simplicity of the settings”. Sandali Ash’s Rao’s Guide to Lime Pickling was commended for its “clear, engaging narrative, its credible characters, its imaginative plot with its clever twists.” Special mention was made of Quintus G. Fernando’s Celibacy Factor as “a work that reads like a humorous parable with heightened characterization and situations”. The judges were especially appreciative of the characterisation of the novel’s antihero and the manner in which his journey and relationships with the villagers were depicted.

Perera (cited above for winning the Gratiaen Prize) is one of Sri Lanka’s most prolific writers in English. He has published a book almost every year, ever since he was first shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize in 2007. Postcards to Bentham, published in 2014, is a collection of seven short stories dealing with diverse themes and a broad range of current socio-political issues and stories that deal with detached, intensely personal experiences. The stories reflect on nationally relevant themes such as war, violence and militarism, as felt in the present day Sri Lankan context, while some stories are focused on personal, solipsistic preoccupations of the individual self.

This year was very productive for Sri Lankan expatriate writers. Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors which was longlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize was shortlisted for the 2014 DSC Prize as well. Just before the year ended, the next set of DSC judges announced that Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll had been shortlisted for the 2015 prize. Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel was named Book of the Year at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards as well as winning the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and sharing the Multicultural Award.

With both local and foreign tourism booming in post-war Sri Lanka, driving a van for hire is one way of earning one’s keep. Furthermore, making a van driver the narrator of a work of fiction is an effective ploy, because drivers encounter various kinds of tourists and other customers who require them to travel to all parts of the country. This is the lot of Vasantha in Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll. After retiring as a government clerk, he buys a van for such a purpose. The first part of this work of fiction focuses on his adventures with an odd mix of travellers to the North, including foreign investors, exiled Sri Lankans intent on showing their ancestral land to their children who grew up abroad, and still others with a voyeuristic interest in a region that was hostile terrain during the war. The second part involves trips within the south of the country. The inclusion of several such vignettes with Vasantha as sometimes observer, sometimes participant, allows Gunesekera to provide a kaleidoscopic view of the country, its inhabitants and the kinds of lives they lead, but the drawback is that they do not allow him to examine too much in depth. In a previous novel, Heaven’s Edge, Gunesekera presented a dystopian view of the island (although not called “Sri Lanka”, it included several Sri Lankan place names), a lawless country that was controlled by various armed gangs. The right thinking individuals could only make gestures towards humanity and preserving the island’s eco-system in such an environment before being destroyed by the forces of evil. That dystopian vision persists in a different form in Noontide Toll. Although the war has ended, the violence and destruction that took place in the past impinges on the reconstruction and reconciliation sought in the present. The cultured, hospitable Major who treats Fr. Perera and Mr Patrick so lavishly in “Mess” has beaten up a woman and “left her to die. If he can do that in his hometown, imagine what he would have been like in a war zone,” Mr Patrick says. Ms Saraswati who had obviously been both a victim during the war and a LTTE cadre, given the scar on her neck and the callus on her trigger finger admonishes Vasantha in “Roadkill” thus: “It is best not to ask about someone’s brother or father or mother or sister. After a war, it is best not to ask about the past.” But it becomes clear that she cannot live down that gruesome past either. In Galle, Vasantha meets a soldier who is in love with a Tamil woman in Trincomalee but is guilt-ridden by the knowledge that he had killed her brother who was a Tiger combatant, a fact the woman does not know. The former LTTE-controlled areas and even parts of the South are derelict, gloomy and unfulfilling to live in – the present and the future always blighted by a gruesome past.

Some overseas academics with Sri Lankan connections have become successful creative writers over a period of time. Yasmine Gooneratne (a well-known poet, even when based in Sri Lanka) is perhaps the most famous among them and in recent years Randy Boyagoda has brought out a novel and Aparna Halpé a collection of poems. Minoli Salgado, the author of Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Space, is the latest to join this community with her novel, A Little Dust on the Eyes. Thakshala Tissera of the University of Colombo writes:

Following the trajectory of several intersecting lives, A Little Dust on the Eyes is primarily structured around two cousins, Savi and Renu. A divorced, doctoral candidate in England, Savi continues to suffer from a sense of displacement and alienation wrought by the childhood trauma of the death of her parents and migration to England. Renu, who drops out of school as a result of the constant disruptions of political violence in Southern Sri Lanka, secretly volunteers at a human rights centre attempting to record the disappearances of the past with the view of ensuring justice. Following years of silence and estrangement, the two cousins re-unite in the weeks leading to the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. Savi appears to finally reconcile herself with the past, accepting the role of political events in shaping her family’s history, and to regain a sense of belonging when the Tsunami strikes, shattering all semblance of closure with an unprecedented violence that leaves the land and its people to grapple with a new trauma of loss effectively conveyed to the reader through Savi’s death at the moment of her maturity as a character.

The novel’s non-linear structure follows the characters’ thoughts and experiences crossing and re-crossing spatial and chronological boundaries with a fluidity that is at times bewildering. However, by juxtaposing multiple narratives, Salgado effectively explores the effects of public events in the private lives of its characters. Their clearly individualized responses to trauma, whether experienced first-hand or vicariously, emphasize the human stories behind the political violence which are often excluded from official narratives. Among the many issues that the novel explores, storytelling or narration is a strikingly recurrent motif. While binding the novel’s several stories together as a cohesive whole, it also enables a complex discussion of the politics of historiography, the textual construction and representation of reality and the importance of unearthing alternative narratives in combating exclusionary nationalist myths.

“Exoticism” is a very controversial term vis-a-vis Sri Lankan writing in English, with some commentators bemoaning its use to “orientalise” the island (especially in fiction) while others refuse to believe that such a problem even exists. Yet another group of commentators acknowledge that a tendency to exoticize does weaken a novel but that other redeeming factors make it a worthy read anyway. A cursory glance at some of the reviews of Afdhel Aziz’s Strange Fruit suggests that his novel has largely attracted the third kind of appraisal. A former Sri Lankan journalist and much more besides, now residing in New York, Aziz was once shortlisted for the Gratiaen prize for China Bay Blues. This novel concerns itself with Maya, who is compelled to leave Sri Lanka as a child on account of the riots, returns a “liberated” woman and falls in love with Malik. Their romance, though idyllic on occasion, is frequently interrupted by the violence and other issues that dogged the country at the time. Wijith de Chickera’s review typifies the approach that many Sri Lankan critics have taken to this novel. While recognizing that “[o]ne of the necessary accompaniments to plucking and eating this exotic offering is that the Sri Lankan reader will have to bear with running commentaries on which food is what, and why it goes well with this and not that in all its teeth-pulling painfulness”, he also says:

There’s more to the tale than a plethora of outré characters, though. Topics and themes that most historians and too many novelists would shy away from, Aziz approaches with élan and éclat. Slices of life from Sri Lanka’s chequered recent past are inserted episodically, challenging would-be escapist readers to revisit the shady places that mother and the nanny state warned us to stay away from.

Although there were no published plays in 2014, the English theatre was more active than in the recent past. The Mind Adventures Theatre group performed “Paraya” in February 2014 for the Colomboscope festival and “Route 101” in July 2014 for The British Council. Both scripts are unpublished. The staging of the latter was especially important because it was the first time that the company had collaborated internationally. The British Council brought down the LookLeftLookRight theatre company to work with Mind Adventures theatre for two weeks. The resulting performance was directed by Tracy Holsinger and Mimi Poskitt, and written by Molly Taylor.

“Paraya” is a play that resists categorizing since it sets out to be experimental and defy the more staid forms of theatrical convention. It is, on the one hand, a political critique and, on the other, a psychosocial exploration of the dark places of the human mind. Giving his views on the play, Shehan Karunatilaka comments, “The setting is a dystopia where a repressive state herds its citizenry into class-based zones and medicates them with a drug that induces patriotism and conformity. ‘Paraya’ tells the story of what happens the day the drug stops working”. He continues,

… the plot does not go from A to Z. Instead, a big opening scene splinters into interlaced subplots, which play out simultaneously across different stages. As an audience, you get to choose the sequence in which you unlock the story and whose eyes you view it through. The play is then repeated twice and you’re invited to explore other characters and story arcs. You can follow the oppressor and the oppressed, the torturer and the tortured and see through the eyes of the cynical and the brainwashed through the eyes of the Other.

The cast included Tracy Holsinger, Brandon Ingram, and Prasad Pereira.

“Route 101” carries the spirit of experimentation to the next level. The title of the play refers to a bus route that is non-existent in Colombo. The actors mingle with the audience in an actual bus which traverses the streets of Colombo and the members of the audience can identify the actors only when those seated beside them get up and perform. The play forces the audience to interact with the actors and become part of the script as the “original” actors assume various roles such as bus conductors, waiters, and market hawkers. “Route 101” has no resolution, which may well be intended as the thrust of the play seems to suggest that there is no resolution in life.

Experimental Theatre seems to be in vogue because the Stages Theatre Group’s newest play “Walking Path – A Play without Words” directed by Jayampathy Guruge and scripted by Ruwanthie de Chickera won four major awards at the 16th Thespo drama festival in Mumbai. Based on the culture of walking paths in the city of Colombo, it won the awards for the Most Outstanding Production, Most Outstanding Director, Most Outstanding Ensemble and Most Outstanding Production Design. It is a play without words and as Duvindi Illankoon comments in a review:

Not defining the play with a language also allows their audience to come up with their own interpretation of what they see on stage. For Ruwanthie, the play explores the rapid gentrification of Colombo and the public’s negotiation with this change, and the silent presence hovering over all these changes. The newly developed Walking Paths are a potent symbol of the country’s peace and freedom following a long conflict, yet it is also an oxymoron, she muses, for ‘it is freedom monitored by the military.’ In the play different scenes tackle the sub cultures that have evolved amongst these Walking Paths. Technology plays a significant role in this evolution, especially in how community is perceived by the new generation.

The Dramsoc drama competition at the University of Peradeniya was conducted as usual but with a reduced number of plays. The following account is based on a report by a participant Praveena Bandara: the evening began with “Cinderella and the Substitute Fairy God Mother” by the Science Faculty which was given a Sri Lankan setting. The play focuses on the bungling efforts of the substitute fairy godmother which results in Cinderella losing her chances with Prince Charming. However, all is resolved at the end. The play which mostly relied on slapstick had very little to offer as mature theatre and was placed third.

The night’s second performance “It’s Here!” by the Arts Faculty demonstrates the fragility of virtue and how humans “fall” when they are controlled by vice. The play was extremely abstract and the devices employed did not effectively convey the intended message. That the cast itself comprised about thirty actors and actresses many of whom appeared to be superfluous on stage further enervated the drama. However, “It’s Here” won two awards for Best Costumes and a special performance award for Best Supporting Actress. This play was placed second.

“The Noose” by the Engineering Faculty was easily the most sophisticated of the three. It follows the thought process of a man who is about to commit suicide and ultimately discloses the real reason for his action. Chalana has had an incestuous relationship with his sister and is distraught when he discovers that she is dying. He is determined to save her somehow and even resorts to a “blood sacrifice” of his own daughter to effect this end. Flashback is a very important structural device. The play begins with Chalana’s last moments being illuminated by a series of flash-backs that ultimately leads to the present time with the horrific image of Chalana suspended in mid-air, having hanged himself. Given the slick and precise timing of scene changes and the effective use of sound and visual effects, it was inevitable that “The Noose” carried all but one of the eleven awards offered.

In a brilliant article written in 1954, Godfrey Gunatilleke argued that the English employed for creative writing at the time was derivative. It was, as he put it, “a language without metaphor” which is also the title of his paper. He contends,

I have still to read a piece of creative writing by a Ceylonese which gathers our landscape, vegetation, the familiar intonations of our speech unobtrusively into an effective idiom, giving me the sense of here and now, the immediacy, which is the moving spirit in art.

Gunatilleke’s Time’s Confluence and Other Poems published sixty years after his seminal piece demonstrates that the English used in Sri Lanka is now capable of conveying various kinds of Sri Lankan experiences. The theme of love is shot through these poems, but not love in the narrow sense of the word. “Burning” is a haunting poem which moves the persona to horror and sadness as he, while driving to work, witnesses the burning body of a man caught in the middle of the conflict between the State and the JVP Party in the late eighties: “Would they have waited for him in some poor home,/ Waited, not knowing at all, this bitter/End; that the loved face and the limbs had become/This fearful thing, this strange, this roadside litter?” The poem then goes on to speculate on how such bestiality could take place in a country known for its Buddhist compassion. In “Images of Famine,” he laments his inability to provide succour to young children who are nothing but “Black on yellow bulbs in living/ Deathheads, browned shrivelled parchment upon bone” and contrasts this world with that of “Bodies whirling in multi-coloured halls of joy/And music deafening the deep silences.” Gratiaen Prize juries over the years have bemoaned the lack of poetic craft among the poets who have submitted entries. However, Time’s Confluence is clearly written by someone who has complete mastery over structure and mood. One senses also the influence of other poets. “Yet somewhere in the night a child alone…” in “Images of Famine” is reminiscent of Derek Walcott’s “Mass Man” and “Let your home be firmly rooted in a dear/Warm place,” which is extracted from the poem “A Prayer and a Homily,” is clearly indebted to W.B. Yeats’ “A Prayer for My Daughter”.

Jean Arasanayagam’s Almsgiving includes fifty-four poems on a variety of subjects but, for the most part, they are associated with the title of the collection in interesting ways. To Amital Touval, the title is normally associated with the act of giving voluntarily to the poor and the needy, but here they “describe not charity but exploitative transactions, forced exchanges, and relationships that inspire retribution, which, if realized, would haunt the self-righteous avengers across many lifetimes”. One could only partially agree with Touval because some of the poems treat the act of giving alms in traditional ways as well. There are two poems called “Almsgiving” in this collection. In “Almsgiving Part One”, Arsanayagam reflects on a painting by Neville Weeraratne which depicts a Buddhist monk receiving alms, a form of exchange supposed to be observed by monks and the laity. While the first three stanzas focus on the merits of the practice which enables a monk to carry out his spiritual tasks, tasks that benefit the laity, especially without the need to earn money to keep his body alive, the middle sections of the poem reflect on poverty – on those who are even more in need of sustenance. In the last section, Arasanayagam gives a new twist to the idea of “alms”: “The stanzas I pour out of the stores within/my inner being are the alms I freely give/to fill the depleted hunger bowls of mendicants . . .”

“The Almsgiving Part Two” begins with an account of the instances in which the poetic speaker has supplied alms to monks who arrive on her doorstep and then talks about another kind of giving on the island where neighbours who observe different religious faiths would exchange the food associated with their festivals with each other. Implicit in the latter part of the poem is a harking back to the days when several communities in Sri Lanka shared a spirit of generosity. Not all the poems are on this theme, however. Some poems (like “The Fan” which is a memorial tribute to Shelagh Goonawardena) are dedicated to individuals, and two poems laud the bravery of the woman from New Delhi who kept saying she wanted to live despite being raped and brutalized to the point of death. They also reflect on the kind of people who could have perpetrated such bestiality on a fellow human. Some of the poems do confirm Touval’s contention that her Dutch ancestors both contributed to the island in various ways but also pillaged it for which their descendents suffered reprisals many generations later.

In his foreword to her second collection of poems, Simply Freckled, Ashley Halpé claims that Krishanthi Anandawansa “articulates . . . a vibrantly feminine voice.” There are indeed some thematically memorable poems in the collection. “The Shrinking Brain” demonstrates the incapacity or unwillingness of current university students to think for themselves; “In Fragrance When We Part,” “On Lovers Day,” “When It Mattered the Most,” and “His Coming,” speak of lost love, remembered joy, and loneliness; and “The Pied Piper’s People” focuses on the gullibility of the populace to fall for the rhetoric of demagogues who turn out to be dictators. The problem with Anandawasa’s poetry is that her technique is not always in sync with her sentiments; for instance, the sing-song rhythm that ends “When It Mattered the Most/And just like the daffodils/Dancing in glee/My mind’s so enthralled/By the love you gave me” weakens an otherwise haunting love poem.

When Sakuntala Sachithanandan won the Gratiaen Prize for On the Streets and Other Revelations, some commentators questioned the decision of the judges on the grounds that the collection did not contain many poems; others found fault with her verses. While these reviewers were often challenged by others, there were members of the reading public who were influenced by the former. Five years later, she has brought out a substantial 164-page collection, with sixty-three poems on a plethora of issues and concerns, which is in effect a riposte to those who had been critical of her previous collection. From “Daughter”, in which she (like Arasanayagam above) voices her outrage at the notorious gang rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi, and “Habeus Corpus”, which shows the trauma of children who are denied a mother’s love because the courts rule that their mother who was guilty of adultery is incapable of bringing up her children, to the sheer musicality of a poem like “Kochi Miris”, Sedahamy, Selvakumari and Others is a work that covers a range of topics. Sometimes the verse is orthodox in conception; on other occasions, it is experimental. She shows overall the ability to employ a tone and structure that is suitable for individual poems.

Academics at the English Departments in Sri Lanka travel overseas and obtain PhDs on Sri Lanka-related topics so regularly that citing such information in this bibliography is impractical and not necessary as well since it is usually confined to published material. But it is noteworthy to refer to the first ever doctoral dissertation published on Sri Lankan Writing in English at the University of Iceland in the year under review. Árný Aurangasiri Hinriksson’s thesis “Dissident Voices: Sociocultural Transformations in Sri Lankan Post-Independence Novels in English” makes a thorough study of the two “insurgencies” in Sri Lanka and the ethnic conflict that prevailed till 2006 as they were characterized in some key Sri Lankan English literary texts. Her approach has not been attempted by any previous researcher in the field.

Soon after he instituted the Gratiaen prize, Michael Ondaatje set up a translation project via the Gratiaen Trust in which stories would be translated from Tamil and Sinhala into English and, subsequently, the same Tamil stories would be translated into Sinhala and vice versa. He foresaw the project as an opportunity for reconciliation and better understanding among ethnic groups in Sri Lanka. Shyam Selvadurai’s Many Roads through Paradise: An Anthology of Sri Lankan Literature is a continuation of the same project in a different guise. As Selvadurai says in his introduction,

This anthology presents an opportunity to show a country and its various cultures in a holistic way by reading a multiplicity of literary voices. In a post-war situation, this anthology provides an opportunity to build bridges across the divided communities by allowing Sri Lankans access to the thoughts, experiences, history and cultural mores of their fellow countrymen, of which they have remained largely ignorant due to linguistic divides.

It is expected that many such translation projects will be undertaken in the near future.

The H.A.I. Gooonetileke Prize for Translation was offered again in 2014 by the Gratiaen Trust and the award was given to the veteran writer Vijitha Fernando for her translation of Keerthi Welisarage’s Kālasarpa as Time Rebounds. The judging panel, comprising Sunil Wijesiriwardena (Chair), Kusuma Karunaratne and Krisanthana Fedricks, commended it “for successfully capturing the spirit and quality of a multilayered text, rich with complex politico-cultural meanings.” A noteworthy feature in the year under review was Shehan Karunatilaka having his multiple award-winning book, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, translated as Chinaman: Pradeep Mathewge Cricket Prawadhaya by Dileepa Abayasekara.

Although the Gratiaen Trust continues to offer a prestigious prize for Creative Writing in English every year, there is a growing feeling among those interested in the field that much of the writing that is produced on the island is still below par. While the numbers of those who produce creative work continue to grow, their enthusiasm is not always accompanied by a mastery of the techniques of writing. It is salutary, therefore, that in the year under review the US-Sri Lanka Fulbright Commission, the English Writers’ Cooperative of Sri Lanka and the British Council conducted various kinds of Creative Writing Workshops. One hopes that such endeavours would improve the quality of work submitted for prize competitions like the Gratiaen. While Gratiaen judges had no difficulty in shortlisting the expected five entries in the first twenty-one years of its existence, the 2013 judges could shortlist only three and their counterparts in 2014 only four. This is an indictment of many of the entries submitted, which perhaps indicate the standard of creative writing in English in the county overall.

Bibliography