The 2025 Gratiaen Prize Winner

Visakesa Chandrasekaram’s The Son and the Lover is a bold intervention in Sri Lankan fiction, a meditation on a queer relationship between a Buddhist monk and a white Australian that crosses ethnic, national, and spiritual borders.

At its heart is Hasi, a monk who discards his robes to pursue a life, and a love, that the world around him refuses to sanction. In tracing his journey alongside his lover Phil, Chandrasekaram carves out space for queer futures in a society long tethered to heteronormative politics and Buddhist orthodoxy.

Written with lyrical precision and a vivid, cinematic imagination, the novel moves between dream and waking, desire and reckoning, with the assured depth of a writer fully in command of his material. The Son and the Lover is a striking debut into Sri Lankan literary space.