Ru Freeman

Ru Freeman was born into a family of writers and many boys in Colombo, Sri Lanka. After a year of informal study at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, she arrived in the United States with a Parker ink pen and a box of Staedler pencils to attend Bates College in Maine. She completed her Masters in Labor Relations at the University of Colombo, and worked in the field of American and international humanitarian assistance and workers’ rights. Her political writing has appeared in English and in translation. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Story Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, WriteCorner Press, Kaduwa and elsewhere and has been nominated for the Best New American Voices anthologies in 2006 and 2008. She has been awarded four consecutive writing scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference from 2006-2009 and she is a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American Literary Review. Her debut novel, A Disobedient Girl, which is published by Atria Books/Simon & Schuster in the USA and Canada, is also published in the UK and territories by Viking, and has been translated into Dutch, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese and Hebrew and is available in Audio from Tantor Media. She will be representing the United States, along with four other American poets and writers in China during the summer of 2010, through the Iowa University, International Writing Program’s Life of Discovery Initiative. She calls both Sri Lanka and America home and writes about the people and countries underneath her skin.

INTERVIEWS

“To Sri Lanka and to the big ambitious novel that takes us through two decades of the country’s political unrest.” Interview with Olive Clancy and Neil Trevithick for the BBC World/The Strand. in London, February, 2010

Ru speaks about writing on Poets & Writers’ feature, Writers Recommend. A full length feature on Ru can be found in Poets & Writers Summer Fiction issue, July/August 2009, available in bookstores.

John Zuarino interviews Ru on Bookslut: “You’ve worked in humanitarian assistance and workers’ rights in the past. Would you say this experience has an effect on your writing, specifically in fiction? If so, how?”

Ru answers five important questions relating to her life as a writer, including what she would be doing if she were not a writer, website she could not live without, books she wishes she had written and thoughts on music and writing on the Fictionaut Five blog. Click here to read the Q&A with Jürgen Fauth.

“Ru began writing as a young child when she wrote to the newspapers in Colombo, Sri Lanka, to protest the fact that a cartoon program she liked to watch had been interrupted by a broadcast by then President, J.R. Jayawardena. She won several awards for her writing when she was still in Sri Lanka, including a Presidential Award for creative writing. Hailing from a family of writers (both her father, Gamini Seneviratne and brother, Malinda Seneviratne, are poets and writers), Ru was taught literary criticism and an appreciation for language by her mother who was a teacher at Royal College.” Read the complete article on Ru in the Sri Lanka Foundation newsletter.

Favourite Books

Fiction:

• Barbara Kingsolver, Poisonwood Bible
• Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger
• Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies
• Lynn Freed, Home Ground
• Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
• Ursula Hegi, Stones From the River
• T. Corraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain
• Toni Morrison, Sula

and Tar Baby

• Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate
• Wendell Barry, The Memory of Old Jack

Nonfiction:

• Ted Conover, New Jack
• Michael Collier, Make Us Wave Back
• Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird
• Michael Ondaatje, Running In the Family

Poetry:

• Catherine Barnett, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes are Pierced
• Mahmoud Dharwish, Unfortunately It Was Paradise
• Yehuda Amichai, Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

My family:

• Gamini Seneviratne, Twenty Five Poems: une vie brève mais intense
• Malinda Seneviratne, Epistles