Author of four novels and winner of the Miles Franklin 2023 prize for her novel, Chai Time at the Cinnamon Gardens, Shankari Chandran is a prolific author whose works focus on dispossessed people and their struggles and experiences. She was born in London and grew up in Canberra. She has worked as a lawyer in the social justice sector for a decade in London before returning to Sydney where she now lives with her family and works with Ultimo Press and Writing NSW.
I got the chance to talk to her at the Sydney Writers’ Festival about her work, her family and her experiences both as a lawyer and a writer.
Date: May 25th 2024
Location- Carriageworks
Your third novel 'Chai Time at the Cinnamon Gardens' focuses on the experiences of people living in Western Sydney, what made you want to want to write about people who live in this area specifically?
I grew up in Canberra but spent a lot of my life in Western Sydney, because our entire extended family is based in Western Sydney and our ancestral community is based in Western Sydney. That’s why I feel like it is my second home from Canberra, and eventually became my first home in that I moved from Canberra to Sydney.
It's a really culturally rich place where there are new migrants and generational migrants and many different kinds of cultures that come together. Sometimes existing separately, sometimes intermingling. The social politics of that region is in itself fascinating. It's like an entire kind of sub-culture, sub-economy, sub-everything, and not hierarchically but something that is itself concentrated and intense and different and fascinating.
I'd grown up knowing that and I'd had clients out there as well when I was working in law reform and enjoyed spending time observing it. It's not just formal research that you would do. A lot of bringing to life time and place is actually about sitting in there observing it and so a lot of the bringing to life of Chai Time at the Cinnamon Gardens is my own lived experience.
How do you balance writing from a personal perspective and writing from research about the historical events you reference and their intergenerational effects?
That is an interesting question actually. For starters I find that history feels very living to me. We go about our daily lives, and we can choose to be aware of it or not. It's very difficult to hold awareness of that [history] in the things that we do because we just have to get on with the things that we do.
At the same time when you write, you write from observation. I think primarily, an observation comes from the act of observing as well as from the act of research and observing the research. So, I think there needs to be, when you’re writing, a distance in your research that you are looking for. Not just the detail and the veracity of the detail, you’re also looking for the insights from the detail that speak to human nature as much as anything else.
Great literature is where the time and place can be a character and a lot of writers, their time and place is so vibrant and vivid that it is a character in and of itself. But it is the people that drive the emotions and so when I'm doing historical research I’m robust about it. I try to be as robust about it as I can and I feel like I've been trained well academically to go search for multiple sources for the truth and for evidence. At the same time fortunate to know so many people, cross paths with so many people, who’ve had either lived experience or have received the generational memories from within their own family and community of that lived experience. It’s a real privilege to try to bring the two together. Having the historical research supporting the human experience without overwhelming the human experience.
Your work focuses a lot on immigrants and dispossessed people and their experiences, what made you want to write about these experiences and bring them into focus?
I’d grown up with an awareness of it my entire life. We were the very fortunate generation, that our parents escaped Sri Lanka before the civil war and then we only watched the civil war. It went on for 30 years and I’m now 50, so the bulk of my life, from when I was 9 to the time that I was 35, a significant portion of my life, has been lived distant to the war but while the war was taking place.
War is dispossession on many different levels and it is not just dispossession for those that are immediately dispossessed by the war but for their future generations. We have lived that, and watched it, and felt the grief and the rage of it having survived it. Then there’s the sense of responsibility to our own people who were hit by it, so in a sense that is where I write.
That’s the place I write in. That is the world I am always building throughout each of my five novels. Each has been about some aspect of the Tamil struggle and the dispossession of the Tamil people, and justice for the Tamil people. In doing so, to also explore and illuminate the universal issues that exist within, because although my work is grounded in the dispossession of the Sri Lankan Tamil people it speaks to dispossession broadly, and the dispossession of people throughout history and throughout the world.
You’ve spent a lot of time working with governments and dispossessed people during your humanitarian law career, how would you say this has influenced your work now, and are there specific themes or issues you want to focus on in your works consequently?
Yeah. Talking of themes first, I think a lot of my work, and this is often the case for lawyers, is about advocacy for systemic improvement. It’s not always the case, but you can have individual lawyers practicing law representing individual people and the program that I led did an element of that. But also because of the resources and geographical spread and profile of the firm we were also really well placed to engage in systemic reform. When you enter into that world what you see is the way that power is entrenched in systems that are supposed to lead, supposed to protect, supposed to provide justice. You see how that power is abused, and by who, and how easily and quickly countries where that happens dissolve into violence. Then into generations of injustice. Those themes are a big part of my work, again, in all my novels.
And were there any issues you wanted to focus on?
The disintegration of the rule of law. The importance of functioning systems of justice in democracy, transparency and accountability. The ease with which power is abused and the effects and consequences for everyday people.
From a language point of view how would you say working in law and with its intricacies has influenced the way you write now?
So, in Chai Time at the Cinnamon Gardens, I had an unnecessary amount of legislation in my first draft. I had entire chunks of the Racial Discrimination Act, just because I really like the RDA, and am intrigued by its’ operation. I stylistically write like a lawyer, I definitely research like a lawyer, and there's an element of advocacy in my work that comes from being a lawyer.
Lawyers are very good at understanding the needs of the client and then responding to that and at a certain point in the drafting of a novel for me, the novel becomes my client, and the reader becomes my client. I try to understand the needs of both and then respond accordingly. Again, in the editorial process we are given draft after draft where you go back and forth. I think many writers can find critique very cutting whereas I feel pretty hardened by having spent over a decade in law firms. Both having been on the receiving end of criticism and being the person that needs to give criticism, I now just look at criticism as something that I transact. When I receive a manuscript with lots of comments on it I just transact the manuscript, and do what I need to do to improve it.
You have four children yourself now, how has this informed your writing and is there a legacy you hope to leave for them through your work, both as an author and a lawyer?
Yeah, definitely. I think the main legacy I would like to leave for my children is that I lived a good life and showed them how to live that too, and that I raised them to be net positive. To contribute and create social capital. To live confidently and curiously and with humility and generosity.
Whatever I do regardless of my professional career, whether it be through being a lawyer or being a writer, if I don’t achieve that for them then I’ve really not achieved anything at all. Building on that in terms of what the experience of being a parent has given to my writing, for starters, parents have got some serious stamina to do the things we do. That helps the writing because writing requires stamina.
I admire people who can write. Who can take themselves into the entirely imagined world of loving someone as much as I love my children [in the real world] and then conveying that through words because I don't know if I am a good enough writer to write that in my novels fictitiously. I write that a lot in my novel, the love between parent and child. I don't know if I could imagine it and then write it if I didn't already live it every day.
How do you balance keeping readers engaged and interested with the story while writing about important and heavy issues?
I write the things that I’d like to read, for starters. As I get older, I tire and I bore and I get distracted more easily. So I think, well I hope, that I bring a style to the writing that keeps me engaged and focused and entertained and also emotionally connected enough to keep reading. To reflect on the issues that I’m exploring and emotionally connected to what I’m talking about.
Humour is an important part of my writing style. I don't set out to try to be funny and sometimes in panels I’ll say, “Well I am a very funny person.” When they ask me how I use humour so effectively. The truth of it is that I actually find life very funny, people are funny.
If you're writing from observation then you will inherently be bringing the humour and the comedy, and often very black dark comedy, and sometimes just warm, light, feel-good comedy, of life. Writing from observation really enables the different aspects of life to inherently sit within a novel, and that keeps the reader going. It enables them to move, and for you to move them between the light and the dark within a piece.
Especially for novels like yours, where the issues are central to the characters themselves. You’re not using them as a vehicle, they lived through that experience and part of the character is the issue you are trying to talk about.
As well as their own humour.
Yes, of course. You’re also very active in the literary community in Sydney, having been published in many Australian journals and being a deputy chair of Writing NSW. What is it like to work within Sydney’s literary world and how do these interactions with the literary community help inform your writing?
It is so great to be a part of Sydney and NSW and Australia’s literary community. It is the best thing about any of those networks and engagements and writing festivals. Meeting and making friendships with writers because we're all on the same journey. We all understand the struggle, and we all understand the obsession, and we look after each other. We’re incredibly supportive and it's been a source of enormous emotional support, and of very practical advice. Writers who are further along in their careers are so generous in their advice about how to navigate things.
Yesterday, I was in the Green Room with Chris Hammer who gave me a master class in a whole lot of technical issues. Then this morning I had coffee with Kate Forsyth who gave me a master class in how I need to navigate the next stage of my career. Both of them did it in their own free time and both of them are incredibly generous, because both of them are much more mature and successful then me. So to be able to learn from their successes and their advice, that comes from their struggles and failures, was hugely helpful. Then it’s just like having a group of friends all the time.
How have you built a community for yourself as a writer in Sydney and what advice would you give to authors trying to build a literary community for themselves?
I think writers find each other. When I was starting out as a mother of four, and working as a lawyer, and doing the school run, it was funny how the writers and artists within that parent community just found each other. It’s almost like you are energetically drawn to each other, somehow. There are also existing networks that are really important to tap into. For example, Writing NSW and Sweatshop which are really important networks for writers of colour and Western Sydney writers. Then these kind of networking events [The SWF].
By nature, I am shy, antisocial, and quite anxious. I don’t naturally want to show up at a social event like this so I’ve had to make myself come, and I have to make myself stay for longer than I used to stay. What I find is the pure enjoyment, the surprising enjoyment of it, is what enables me to want to come now and want to stay. So, it's trusting that there is incredible fellowship and enjoyment and friendship in those networks that will get you there.
And just some practical advice, I think there are local writing groups, and libraries, and arts centres, that have lots of opportunities to create community. Writing NSW for me was the first and remains the primary way of connecting with the writing community because they facilitate writers. They understand what a lonely journey it can be, and they understand the kind of support that writers need. From emotional support to physical support, logistical support to advice on the different paths of the writing life and writing career.
What has your publishing journey been like and is there any advice you would have for first-time authors in Sydney?
I love that my publisher is Sydney-based. I love that he is close by so we can pop out and see each other on a regular basis. The thing about the world today is that [for example] I met for the first time today, my LA agent. We’ve had numerous interactions but today is the first time I’ve really met my LA agent.
All of us have learnt, particularly post-Covid, to develop close relationships, and friendships, and respectful working partnerships with people through Teams, and through the internet, and around the world, because we have to. At the same time there is something wonderful about having my publisher in Sydney. Being able to interact with him in person. To build a friendship and an artistic collaboration in person.
At the same time, I don't feel like I would advise somebody to do that because you work with the publisher that's right for you your entire career. For me, Robert and Ultimo Press were right for my entire career and the issues that I write about, which are very much about culture, ancestry, dispossession, history and so on. Because there is a real alignment in the issues that I explore and the values that Ultimo Press want to platform. The fact that they live in Sydney then, just as an incidental benefit, works very well for me.
Well, that’s everything, thank you so much for your time.
Not at all, it was an absolute pleasure.
Leaving the interview, we talked about Chandran’s excitement to be at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Her warmth and empathy in person are clearly reflected in her works, which focus on the struggle of dispossessed people and are must-reads for anyone who wants to get a deeper insight into the lives and struggles of immigrants and people in Sydney.
