- This event is over. However, time travel possible through our Audio & Video! See upcoming events
Swashbuckling Sri Lankan Cricketers
Scholarship and Storytelling
Speakers
From Sathasivam to Sangakkara, Murali to Malinga, Sri Lanka can lay claim to some of the world’s most remarkable cricketers – larger-than-life characters who thumbed convention and played the game their own way. More so than anywhere else in the world, Sri Lankan cricket has an identity. This is the land of pint-sized swashbuckling batsman, on-the-fly innovators and contorted, cryptic spinners.
On the field of play, Victorian ideals of the past collide with madcap tropical hedonism to create something dizzying. Cricket is Sri Lanka, and Sri Lanka is cricket. We all know the story of the ’96 World Cup: how a team of unfancied amateurs rose from obscurity to the top the world, doing so with such swagger that they changed the way the game was played. Yet the lore of Sri Lankan cricket stretches back much further.
In the early days, matches between colonists and locals imbued cricket with a nationalistic drive. Ashes-bound ships stopping over in Colombo brought the world’s biggest stars, from Bligh and Bradman to Grace and Grimmet. More recently, Sri Lanka has had to face the triumphs and tragedies that come when cash flows freely into the gentleman’s game.
An Island’s Eleven tells this story for the first time, focusing on the characters and moments that have shaped the game forever. The book recently won the MCC & Cricket Society Book of the Year.
The author, Nicholas Brookes will be in conversation with Sharda Ugra.
Speakers
Nicholas Brookes
Nicholas Brookes is an English writer, who has been based in Colombo since April 2018. He has covered Sri Lankan cricket and its history for international publications including ESPN’s The Cricket Monthly and Wisden’s The Nightwatchman.
Sharda Ugra
Sharda Ugra spent more than three decades in sports journalism, working with Mumbai tabloid Mid-Day, national daily The Hindu, India Today magazine and ESPNcricinfo and ESPN India.
During this time, she has written and spoken about issues around Indian sport at home and abroad in popular and academic publications.
She worked with former New Zealand captain John Wright on John Wright’s Indian Summers, his memoirs of his years coaching India and with Yuvraj Singh on The Test of My Life, an account of his diagnosis and recovery from cancer. She was a fellow of the Australia India Institute, University of Melbourne in 2013. Having finally left the formal workforce, she believes she is just getting started.
