Shyam Selvadurai was born in 1965 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He came to Canada with his family at the age of nineteen, after the 1983 riots in Colombo. Selvadurai has studied creative writing and journalism, and has a B.F.A. from York University. He has written for television, and his fiction and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies. Funny Boy, his first novel, was published to immediate acclaim in 1994, and won the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and, in the U.S., the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Men's Fiction. The novel has also been published in the U.S., the U.K, India, and in numerous countries in Europe.