The Wretched and the Damned
Published: June 2025 Publisher: Perera Hussein Winner of the Gratiaen Prize 2023 - Sri Lanka’s most prestigious award for English writing
In the shadows of Colombo, a war is brewing. Decades of dynasty politics, corruption, and social stratification have paved the way for the Kodithuwakku family’s suffocating rule. Beneath the surface of Colombo’s elite circles, the Karaawa unleash a plan. Led by the enigmatic Thanthri, they weaponize finance, technology, and their own extraordinary talents to orchestrate a nation’s downfall, hoping to rebuild it from the ashes.
Told through eight (or more) first-person narrators, The Wretched and the Damned explores power, systemic rot, and the terrifying cost of revolution in a nation perpetually at war with itself - and the human toll of wielding godlike abilities in a fight for a nation’s soul.
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Coverage in the immediate aftermath of the Gratiaen Prize: the Morning and the Sunday Times.
Behind the Scenes
I had always told myself that I would not write about Sri Lanka in my fiction. My work at Watchdog seemed like enough writing about Sri Lanka; my fiction was a place to get away from the mass graves and government crackdowns for a little while.
The Wretched and the Damned made me break that rule. I had been spending far too much time examining the exact ways in which Sri Lanka could fall apart - and before it came in handy for research, everything coalesced into this book in 2021.
Writing it was a bizarre experience. On a technical level I was trying to push my ability with the first-person form; defying common sense, the book has eight (or more) first-person narrators. On some days the words came as if by compulsion; on others what came through was a terrible nihilism.
Getting it out was just as strange. As a fundamentally Sri Lankan book, it fell into that awkward category of “impossible to sell outside Sri Lanka.” I decided to put it out over email, chapter by chapter - until Elon Musk bought Twitter, which owned the email service I was using (Revue), and the newsletter vanished.
And Sri Lanka collapsed in 2022, in nearly the exact way I was expecting it to.
Profoundly irritated and with nothing else to do with the manuscript, I threw it at the Gratiaen Prize - and it won, in 2023. Perera Hussein took it on, and as a result we have this book.