This year’s winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Shankari Chandran, talks with Ashley Hay about her novel Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens. What is the role of storytellers in claiming and retelling historical events?
Join us for this examination of how Shankari’s intergenerational epic confronts Australia’s uneasy relationship with multiculturalism and postcolonial trauma.
Shankari Chandran is an Australian author who uses storytelling to explore dispossession and the creation of community. Shankari’s first novel, Song of the Sun God, was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2019 and shortlisted for Sri Lanka’s Fairway National Literary Award in 2018. Her latest novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2023.
Ashley Hay is a Brisbane-based award-winning novelist and essayist. Ashley worked as the former editor of the Griffith Review between 2018 and 2022, curating, commissioning and creating 16 editions of Australia’s leading quarterly of great writing and new ideas.
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