By Yong Shu Hoong

When Romesh Gunesekera's first novel, Reef, was published in 1994, it received widespread acclaim – and a place within the shortlist as a finalist for the Booker Prize. Other novels followed: The Sandglass (1998), Heaven's Edge (2002), The Match (2006) and The Prisoner of Paradise (2012).

Born in 1954 in Sri Lanka, he had also lived in the Philippines, before moving to London, where he currently resides. An elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has been a judge for a number of literary prizes, including the Caine Prize for African Writing, the David Cohen Literature Prize and the Forward Prize for Poetry.

His stories were featured in publications like London Magazine and Granta. His first collection of stories, Monkfish Moon (1992), was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1993, while The Spice Collector (2008) is a limited-edition bilingual collection of three stories set in the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira in the 17th century. His latest book of stories, Noontide Toll, will be published in 2014.

1. What are you reading right now?
Lots of new short stories because I am doing an event on the short story in Kolkata in a few days' time. Also Jack Kerouac's On the Road for BBC Radio 4's A Good Read.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
Rick in Casablanca so I can say it again, Sam.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I live on another planet.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
Living: the one down the road who tells me every time I bump into him, "I have this book in my head I just can't seem to get down on paper…"
Dead: that one who wrote that book that I liked and whose name I forget.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
In the days of Moses, it was called a tablet. Best way to deal with it is to use a hammer and chisel.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
The ability to make me feel thrilled by the words on the page.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
Delusions of grandeur.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
"Nulla dies sine linea…" – Horace.

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
do live on another planet.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
Action thriller for escapism.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Favourite: "serendipity". Everyone's favourite word.
Least favourite: "reject", or any of its more extended variations.

12. Write a Singapore-based short-short story in three lines that include the following three items: rain, orchids, Christmas.
Christmas is a cruel time for fir trees in Norway, turkeys in Britain and the poor everywhere. Lucky orchids drinking the summer rain in Singapore living like artists on air.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
A beating heart.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
When I wake up.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Bartleby the scrivener, because he'd prefer not to.
Poirot, because he'd enjoy the food and solve the mystery.
Erato, the Greek muse of poetry.

16. A talk that you gave during your writer-in-residency stint at Nanyang Technological University in 2013 was entitled 'Islands of the Imagination'. After spending some time in Singapore, did this tiny island stir your imagination in any way?
Yes! Singapore is a fascinating island in a constant state of change. I've seen Singapore on short visits over many decades (the first time being in 1965). Up to now it has been on the periphery of my fiction, but I am sure it will come into focus for me at some point like an orchid in the rain.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
I don't intend to get a tombstone before I die, and afterwards there might be a problem writing on it. But if the physical impediment is overcome, then I'd write the untold story.

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