Tamil Heritage Month Reads

January is Tamil Heritage Month! Check out books by Tamil authors.

All Books in this Collection

Showing all 8 results

  • Love Cake

    Love Cake

    By: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
    $20.95

    Winner of the Lambda Literary Award, Lesbian Poetry, 2012
    Honourable Mention, San Francisco Book Festival, Poetry, 2012

    In Love Cake, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of colour resist and transform violence through love and desire. Refusing to forget the traumas of post 9/11 Islamophobia, and Sri Lanka’s civil war, Love Cake documents the persistence of survival and beauty. It maps the complicated, luscious joy of reclaiming the body and sexuality after abuse, examines a family history of violence with compassion, and celebrates the beautiful resistance of queer people of colour in love and home-making.

  • The Enchanted Loom

    The Enchanted Loom

    By: Suvendrini Lena
    $19.95

    The Sri Lankan civil war has left many scars on Thangan and his family, most noticeably the loss of his eldest son and the crippling epileptic seizures brought on by his torture. As the final days of the war play out, the family bears witness from their new home of Toronto. Thangan’s other son Kanan comes home from a protest, shaken that someone referred to him by his brother’s name. His young daughter Kavitha innocently dances around with a mysterious pair of anklets that she found. And Thangan’s wife Sevi is consumed with feeling responsible for her broken family. Amidst the ongoing trauma, the family is faced with the possibility of Thangan undergoing neurological surgery. Will the surgery give them a chance to heal, or will it cause even more pain?

    Presented in both English and Tamil, this poetic play is both medical and mystical, drawing a connection between trauma and memory that creates a stark reminder of loss, hope, family, and freedom. 

  • The Sadness of Geography

    The Sadness of Geography

    By: Logathasan Tharmathurai
    $19.99

    The harrowing journey of a teenage refugee who never gave up on his dream of seeing his family again.

    Born to a wealthy family in northern Sri Lanka, Logathasan Tharmathurai and his family lost everything during the long and brutal Sri Lankan Civil War.

    In January 1985, at the age of eighteen, he left his home in a desperate bid to build a new life for himself and his family abroad after a deeply traumatic encounter with a group of Sinhalese soldiers. As his terrifying and often astonishing journey unfolds, he finds himself in a refugee camp, being smuggled across international borders, living with drug dealers, and imprisoned.

    The Sadness of Geography is a moving story of innocence lost, the persecution of an entire people, and the universal quest for a better life.

  • Then There Were No Witnesses

    Then There Were No Witnesses

    By: P Ahilan
    $24.95

    Translated from Tamil into English by Geetha Sukumaran.

    In recent times, Tamil poetry from Sri Lanka has taken a new turn, serving as a countermemory–a witness to torture, loss, trauma, and exile. Ahilan gives us a unique voice and style, in which he expresses the trauma of the violence in Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka with great nuance and subtlety. His background as art historian has allowed him to blend the 2,000-year-old Tamil cultural, literary, and philosophic tradition with visual, graphic imagery to create a rich and distinct body of poetry.

  • Uncivil War

    Uncivil War

    By: Indran Amirthanayagam
    $24.95

    Passionate, committed, and deeply humane, these poems bear witness with unflinching honesty to the horrific violence of the Sri Lankan civil war.

  • Wilting Laughter

    Wilting Laughter

    By: R Cheran, VIS Jayapalan
    $28.95

    This collection brings together seventy-five poems by three renowned contemporary Tamil poets, whose works stand at the forefront of modern Tamil poetry. All three poets have experienced the pain and dislocation of recent Sri Lankan violence, the rupture of traditional life and the anguish of mass exile, all of which constantly inform their works. Each has created from these experiences a distinct and modern poetics, drawing from the same rich two-thousand-year-old culture.

  • World Without Walls

    World Without Walls

    $36.00

    In the past few decades Tamil has become an important component of the South Asian diaspora. As one of the few classical languages of the world that is still a living one, Tamil continues to remain a vehicle of secularism while celebrating diverse religious and political traditions. It has served Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, and Christianity, while articulating politics from the time of the ancient kings, through colonialism, to modern times. The essays in this volume offer a nuanced view of “Being Human; Being Tamil” in the context of South Asia and the diaspora. They explore the multiple ways of being Tamil, and the cultural, religious, and poetic linkages that have contributed to the emergence and articulation of Tamilness in a global context.

  • You Cannot Turn Away

    You Cannot Turn Away

    By: R Cheran
    $24.95

    This book provides, for the first time, a bilingual edition of poetry by R Cheran. These 40 poems cover a range of experiences, including love, war, despair, hope, and diaspora. Cheran is considered one of the finest contemporary poets in Tamil. Both modernist and unfailingly lyrical, his work is a remarkable blend of tradition and innovation. The forty poems in this volume have been translated and introduced by Chelva Kanaganayakam.