A silhouetted family of four stand on a beach in Sri Lanka, gazing at the ocean under a dark, stormy sky.

A family standing on a beach in Colombo. Saraid de Silva’s novel is part of a changing literary landscape of New Zealand featuring more and more voices of the Southasian diaspora.Arthur Tseng / Unsplash

Saraid de Silva on her Women’s Prize longlisted novel ‘Amma’: Southasia Review of Books podcast #20

A conversation with the Sri Lankan-Pākehā writer on exploring anger, trauma, queerness and displacement in a multigenerational saga of three women from the Southasian diaspora

Published on:

24 Mar 2025, 2:06 am

Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books Podcast from Himal Southasian, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan speaks to the Auckland-based Sri Lankan-Pākehā writer Saraid de Silva about her debut novel, Amma (Moa Press / Weatherglass Books April 2024), now longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025.

It’s 1951 in old Singapore. Ten-year-old Josephina kills her abuser. This becomes the defining moment in the lives of Josephina, her daughter Sithara, and her daughter Annie.

Amma follows three generations of these Southasian women, whose stories move across Singapore in the 1950s, Colombo in the 1970s, Invercargill in the 1980s, Christchurch in the 2000s and present day London, Melbourne and Colombo.

This is a novel about how deeply the past impacts the present, and how shifting culture, circumstances and misunderstandings have forced the women apart despite their love for each other, and what it will take to knit them back together. It’s ultimately also about the often difficult and resilient connections between mother and daughter, and the inexplicably special relationship between grandmother and granddaughter and how these reproduce themselves and change over time.

This episode is now available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Youtube.

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Episode notes:

Amma by Saraid de Silva (Moa Press / Weatherglass Books April 2024)

Conversations With My Immigrant Parents - produced for RNZ by Saraid de Silva and Julie Zhu

Talking to others with immigrant parents 'has dislodged my anger and left me with pride' - Saraid de Silva (The Post, May 2023)

Good Immigrant Novels: Jhumpa Lahiri and the Aesthetics of Respectability - Sanjena Sathian (The Drift, May 2021)

On Authenticity, Research, and Writing From the Diaspora - V V Ganeshananthan (Literary Hub, January 2023)

The fight to decriminalise same-sex relationships in Sri Lanka - Devana Senanayake (Himal Southasian, February 2025)