Randy Boyagoda

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist who writes about books and ideas for publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times, and the Financial Times. He is a professor of English and director of the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.

Boyagoda's new novel is Lords of Serendipity.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I hope the title Lords of Serendipity takes readers into this story by asking themselves two questions. First, who are the Lords? Second, what’s Serendipity? As readers will discover, in a novel about a Sri Lankan village girl who dreams of going to Harvard and then does whatever it takes to get in, people who teach and study at the world’s great universities are like lords, while getting in, as a student, is a source of unexpected joy and beauty, or serendipity. By the way, the word serendipity comes from the earliest European name for Sri Lanka — Serendib — based on their sense of a happy and unexpected discovery of a beautiful island.

What's in a name?

As much as you want to put into it. For instance, in Lords of Serendipity, the main character, a young woman named Devi, applies to Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford. Devi’s skeptical mother, a Sri Lankan village woman, refers to these places by the shorthand nickname OCHPYS (try saying it aloud). At some point, one of the characters realizes that the letters can be rearranged to spell PSYCHO…

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage reader self was a Michael Ondaatje wannabe. That self would be surprised by this new novel, because it’s satirical instead of lyrical.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I find beginnings far harder to write and I change these frequently. Endings, not so much – these tend to come into being more organically, thanks to the momentum of the story itself.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Lords of Serendipity is a global campus novel that explores university experience from the vantages of students, professors, parents, and various outsiders interested in getting in. Since the age of 19, I’ve been a university person – as an undergraduate in Canada, an international graduate student in the United States, a professor, university administrator, and now the parent of college-age children. I think I identify with elements of experience from all of my main characters.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

As I suggested, above, my lifetime of experiences in higher education – in a variety of ways and from a range of vantages — have been significant influences on my writing this novel. Beyond that, in writing a global campus novel, I pursued research in a variety of higher education settings both familiar and unfamiliar, including the Vatican Observatory for research in astronomy, and a range of very different universities in Sri Lanka, the UK, Canada, and the United States. Perhaps the most memorable experience I had along these lines was, well, serendipitous. I was in Sri Lanka to do some research at a local university and unexpectedly found way into an international university fair, where Sri Lankan families learned about opportunities to study at schools around the world. This was a great help to my imagining the combination of promise and peril, gilt and rot, that figures in the university dreams and schemes of young people around the world and the institutions that seek to inspire, educate, and profit from these young people.

Visit Randy Boyagoda's website.

The Page 69 Test: Governor of the Northern Province.

--Marshal Zeringue