ABSTRACT
In a context where Sri Lankans are looking for greater understanding and empathy from each relevant side to see if we can find ways of getting on better with each other, what I am trying to do is to allow outsiders to my language, a glimpse into mine – and though one cannot essentialize any ethnic formation and have one collective represent the whole, the group that is chosen here does reach out to a large spectrum within the majority community: they are fiction writers with a national reputation for excellence, having been often awarded multiple times, having a very large readership in a country that takes literary prizes very seriously. What I have done here is collect fifteen short stories and thirteen excerpts from novels by fourteen writers of Sinhala fiction, each of which deals with a current issue connected mainly to ethnicity in post-war Sri Lankan society, in the hope it will help in finding greater understanding and greater empathy among different ethnic formations in Sri Lanka, so necessary in the movement towards peace.
