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Alistair Niven, Anna Rutherford, British Council, Burma, Eddie Baugh, Edwin Thumboo, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Michael Ondaatje, Punyakante Wijenaike, Salman Rushdie, V S Naipaul, Yasmine Gooneratne
In addition to sending me to Britain for the Literature Seminar in 1985, the Council sponsored a lot of travel for me over the years. Much of this was to Britain, for two training programmes in 1988 and in 1991, and for the Triennial Conference of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies at Canterbury in 1989. I believe ACLALS had originally been set up to look also at literature in other languages, but obviously that was a massive task and meanwhile the corpus of writing in English from all over had grown so significantly that keeping up with that alone was already proving difficult.
Many papers at the Conference indeed involved close study of obscure Commonwealth writers by European academics carving out niches for themselves. Many were the bubbles that were blown large in those years, that soon burst without trace, the glamorous young lady for instance who read the same extract at an interval of three years from the only work she had produced that had been deemed significant, the almost white Australian who claimed to be of aborigine ancestry and declaimed about persecution, the supposed masterpieces that had won the Booker Prize and proved unreadable.
