Romesh Gunesekera

Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.

I was very lucky - it wasn't a question of being wealthy my father was just extremely lucky with the couple of jobs he got. So we got a chance to travel when nobody else could travel.

To come to England in the 1970s was to return to this strange other-world of half-known history. I found the imperial architecture curiously familiar: the post office, the town hall, the botanic gardens.