ARTWORK BY SUSIMAN NIRMALAVASAN bookends the award-winning playwright S Shakthidharan’s new memoir, Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath. The volume opens and closes with the painter’s scenes of flying fish, ornate woodwork and lush flora – evocative of Sri Lanka’s Tamil-majority northern and eastern coasts – rendered in deep blues and impressionistic browns. Here, land flows into ocean and ocean into land, each endlessly constitutive of the other.
Based in Batticaloa, in Sri Lanka’s East, Nirmalavasan is well-known for his use of local materials to create mixed-media art about Sri Lanka’s nearly three-decade-long war, fought between the state and Tamil separatists until its formal end in 2009. His growing body of work is a profound study of the shadows that the war’s unresolved aftermath continues to cast over Tamil people on the island. In Gather Up Your World, his flyleaf illustrations expand on the themes of migration and kinship that animate the words within.
A Sydney-based storyteller, Shakthidharan identifies as of “Sri Lankan heritage and Tamil ancestry”. He is best known as the playwright behind the award-winning Counting and Cracking, which draws on his family’s stories of immigrating from Sri Lanka to Australia as the war unfolded. Gather Up Your World uses epistolary memoir to return to that arc. It asks how lives shaped by rupture can be gathered into a collective archive. Traversing his family’s intertwined histories of political violence, generational loss and cultural identity, these stories about Shakthidharan’s loved ones provide intimate genealogies of the collapse of states and nations, kinships and homes – and also of their reconstructions.
‘Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath’ by S Shakthidharan (Powerhouse Publishing, September 2025)
Each chapter is addressed to a different “you,” dispersing plot and protagonist across an array of human and non-human viewpoints. This structure underscores the memoir’s refusal to separate the private from the political. In these letters, we see how the state is created, maintained and policed not only in its parliaments and at its borders, but also in the mundanity and wonder of everyday life.