By Ben Travis

Sonali Deraniyagala-pic courtesy of: BBC

Sonali Deraniyagala has won the PEN/Ackerley Prize 2014 for Wave, her memoir recounting the loss of her parents, her husband and two young sons in the tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka in December 2004.

“The pleasure of receiving this wonderful prize makes me see that there is a beauty in struggle and a resting place in the eyes of others,” said Deraniyagala, who was awarded the prize last night. “I have found myself a writer, another identity in the ongoing bewildering journey of my life.”

Chair of judges Peter Parker said: “To write any kind of book about the loss of both parents, a husband and two small sons in a natural disaster is a hazardous undertaking, but in Wave Sonali Deraniyagala has produced one that goes far beyond its dreadful starting point. Subtitled “A Memoir of Life After the Tsunami”, it is as much a reclamation and celebration of the lives that were lost as it is an account of the processes of shock, grief and mourning. In a strong and varied shortlist, Wave emerged as the winner of this year’s Prize because it upholds the standards that J R Ackerley himself set: truthful, unsparing, and written with outstanding grace and economy.”

The PEN/Ackerley prize, first awarded in 1982, is dedicated to recognising memoirs and autobiographies. This year’s other shortlisted titles included Stage Blood by Michael Blakemore, Levels of Life by Julian Barnes, Horace and Me by Harry Eyres, and Ammonites and Leaping Fish by Penelope Lively. The prize is awarded in memory of Joe Randolph Ackerley, literary editor of The Listener magazine, who died in 1967. Funded by Ackerley’s posthumous royalties, the prizewinner receives £3000. Previous recipients include Alan Bennett and Germaine Greer.

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Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala: review

‘It still seems far-fetched, my story, even to me,” writes Sonali Deraniyagala in a memoir which begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004. Having spent Christmas on the idyllic southern coast, the author and her family see waves leaping over the ridge of the beach. Hours later, her Sri Lankan parents, British husband and two small sons are dead, their bodies swallowed by the water.

There was, she writes, “no moment of separation, not one that I was aware of anyway. It was not like I tried to cling to my children as they were torn from my arms, it was not like they were yanked from me, not like I saw them dead. They simply vanished from my life forever.”

Wave charts the tortured years since Deraniyagala was forced to face this impossible truth. At first suicidal in her aunt’s house in Colombo, then shattered by quotidian objects in her family home in London, she describes navigating a world without those she loves. Now living in New York, she remains “cut loose, adrift, hazy about my identity” as she constantly trips up between her new life and old memories. “Who am I now?” she asks.

It is a nightmarish tale of what happened that desperate day and the desolation and rage that followed. At times, Deraniyagala’s honesty shocks. When her friend’s parents are left behind by the jeep racing her family away from water, she doesn’t call out to the driver to wait for them. “He’s right,” she remembers thinking, “we have to keep moving.”

Earlier she has described how, in “a splintered second”, she left her own parents behind: “I didn’t stop for my parents,” she writes. “I didn’t stop to knock on the door of my parents’ room, which was next to ours… I didn’t shout to warn them.” Later, she reveals a “hideous” truth: “there [is] a pecking order in my grief”. She has pushed her parents to the fringes of her heart, unable to deal with both their loss and that of her animal-loving seven year-old Vikram, her theatrical five year-old Malli, and her intelligent East-End husband Steve.

For three years, Deraniyagala tries to “indelibly imprint they are dead” on her consciousness, stalked by a fear that should she forget, then remembering would “be more harrowing than the constant knowing”. At the same time, she struggles to speak her tragedy aloud, hiding her loss from new friends. When first found, she couldn’t tell her rescuers what had happened or ask for help in searching for her sons: “Telling them would make it too real.”

Wave is Deraniyagala’s attempt, eight years after the tsunami, to tell the story of that day and its aftermath. Uncomfortable and unsettling, it is a reminder of the horror of this mass tragedy as well as a brave, brutal portrait of Deraniyagala’s own individual, inescapable grief and love.

Courtesy:telegraph.co.uk