Chelva Kanaganayakam

Kanaganayakam was born on May 7, 1952, in Colombo, Ceylon.[1][2] He was the son of V. Chelvanayakam, head of the Department of Tamil at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, and Kamalambikai.[1][2][3][4] He was educated at Trinity College, Kandy.[5] After school Kanaganayakam joined the University of Sri Lanka Peradeniya campus but following Osmund Jayaratne's "re-organisation" of universities, he and other language and literature students were moved to the university's campus in Kelaniya.[1][6] He graduated in 1976 with a B.A. degree in English language and literature.[1][2][3][7]

Kanaganayakam was married to Thirumagal.[1][2][4] They had a daughter (Shankary) and a son (Jegan).[1][2][4]

Kanaganayakam was a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Jaffna before joining the University of British Columbia on a Commonwealth scholarship, receiving a Ph.D. degree in 1985 after producing a thesis, supervised by W. H. New, on the writings of Zulfikar Ghose.[1][2][3][7] Kanaganayakam joined the University of Toronto's Department of English in 1989 to research and teach Commonwealth literature.[1][2][7] Appointed a professor in 2002, he went on to become director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and co-ordinator of the independent studies program at Trinity College, Toronto.[1][2][3][7]

Kanaganayakam was a founding member of the Tamil Literary Garden and the Toronto Tamil Studies Conference.[1][2][3] On the morning of November 22, 2014, Kanaganayakam was inducted to the Royal Society of Canada as a fellow in Quebec City.[1][2][3][7] That evening, as he went to a celebratory dinner in Montreal, he suffered a heart attack and died.[1][2][3][7]

Kanaganayakam wrote, translated and edited several books:[3]

• Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose (1993, University of Toronto Press)[6][7]
• Configuartions of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their World (1995, TSAR Publications)[7][8]
• Dark Antonyms and Paradise: The Poetry of Rienzi Crusz (1997, TSAR Publications)[6][7]
• Lutesong and Lament: Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka (2001, TSAR Publications, editor)[1][8]
• Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction (2002, Wilfrid Laurier University Press)[1][7]
• Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature (2005, TSAR Publications, editor)
• History and Imagination: Tamil Culture in the Global Context (2007, co-editors R. Cheran & Darshan Ambalavanar)[1][9]
• New Demarcations: Essays in Tamil Studies (2009, Brown Bear Press, co-editors R. Cheran & Darshan Ambalavanar)[9]
• Wilting Laughter: Three Tamil Poets (2009, translator)[8][10]
• Nedunalvaadai (2010)
• You Cannot Turn Away (2010, translator)[11]
• Ritual (2011, translator)[10]
• World Without Walls: Being Human, Being Tamil (2011, co-editor)[9]
• In Our Translated World: Contemporary Global Tamil Poetry (2013, TSAR Publications, editor)[1][7]
• A History of South Asian Writing in English (2014, Cambridge University Press)[7]
• Uprooting the Pumpkin: Selections from Sri Lankan Tamil Literature, 1950-2012 (2016, Oxford University Press, editor)[1]