Mage Kathawa is a collection of short stories by Martin Wickramasinghe (1890-1976), first published in 1947. This is a Sinhala-language edition. The title means My Story. Despite that title, the standard bibliographies of the author's work in both the English and Sinhala Wikipedias list it among his short-story collections rather than among his autobiographical books, which are Ape Gama (1940) and Upanda Sita (1961).
Wickramasinghe is remembered above all as a novelist, but the short story was a form he worked in for most of his career. His first collection, Geheniyak, appeared in 1924 and was the first book of its kind published in Sri Lanka, and his stories, which the Martin Wickramasinghe Trust counts at well over a hundred, were gathered into a series of volumes over the following decades. Like much of his fiction, they tend to draw on village life in the south of the island and on ordinary people treated with sympathy rather than satire.
Mage Kathawa belongs to one of the most productive periods of his life. It came out in the same year as Madol Doova, his much-loved novel of boyhood, and between Gamperaliya (1944) and Yuganthaya (1949), two volumes of the trilogy that traces the decline of a village family and the rise of a new commercial class.
It suits readers who already know Wickramasinghe's novels and want to explore his shorter fiction in the original Sinhala.
- Author: Martin Wickramasinghe
- Published: 1947
- Language: Sinhala
