Our Special Correspondent

In 2019, the Tamil literary world witnessed the arrival of a remarkable new voice through Ayya — The Ninety-Five-Year-Old Child! by Vadivarasu, a native of Thiruvadathanur village in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruvannamalai district. Written with disarming intimacy, the book traces how an ageing father — a hardworking farmer, an unlettered yet extraordinary man who served as the village pūchāri (priest), performed therukoothu (Tamil folk street theatre), and even acted as the de facto veterinarian for every

Saththiri, born in Sandilipai, Jaffna, is a Sri Lankan Tamil writer. In the aftermath of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom, like many youths of that era who turned to militancy, he joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), operating under the nom de guerre Siyam. Due to his role in the organization’s explosives division, which was then headed by senior LTTE member Appaia, he became known among the cadres as Sakkai (Explosive) Siyam. He later worked for several years within the LTTE’s interna

There is a photograph somewhere in the archives of British medical history: a Tamil man from war-torn Sri Lanka, standing in the wood-panelled chambers of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, holding a gavel once wielded by some of the most powerful physicians in the Western world. It shouldn't have happened. Not to a boy from Jaffna. Not to someone who began his career in a country that would soon tear itself apart. Not to a Tamil doctor in an era when the world chose to see