Shankari Chandran

Shankari Chandran is an Australian-Sri Lankan author who won the Miles Franklin Award in 2023 for Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, a novel set in an Australian nursing home that becomes a microcosm of the country's cultural diversity and colonial history. The novel is a wide-ranging and compassionate work about ageing, identity, and what it means to belong. Chandran grew up in Canberra in a Sri Lankan Tamil family and worked as a lawyer for UNICEF before turning to writing. Her debut novel Song of the Sun God (2012) explored the Sri Lankan civil war through multiple generations of a Tamil family. Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens was her fourth novel and the one that brought her to national attention. Her novels are deeply concerned with the Tamil diaspora experience, intergenerational trauma, and the politics of race and belonging in Australia. She lives in Sydney with her family.