I owe so much to Gary Pulsifer. In 1996, when my manuscript for a political novel about Sri Lanka, When Memory Dies, had been rejected as unmarketable by 20-odd publishers, it was Gary, just starting out with Arcadia, who had the courage and faith to publish it – and, to his credit, it went on to win the Commonwealth Writers’ Eurasia prize and the Sagittarius prize. And, more to the point, it became a touchstone in the struggle against communalism in my country. What Gary saw in the novel was, in his own words, “a three-generational saga of a Sri Lankan family’s search for coherence and continuity in a country broken by colonial occupation and riven by ethnic wars”. More broadly, Gary saw fiction as an imaginative and unending search for truth, for social truth above all. He was a tremendous friend, a committed intellectual, a joy to be with.
