Randy Boyagoda
Biography
Writer, critic and scholar Randy Boyagoda is the author of four novels, a SSHRC-supported critical biography, and a scholarly monograph. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection and Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Walrus, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, Guardian, New Statesman, and Globe and Mail, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio and podcasting for the Toronto Public Library. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017 and is currently a member of The Walrus Educational Review Committee and serves as the University of Toronto’s advisor on civil discourse. His fourth novel, Dante’s Indiana, was published in 2021.
Select publications
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. Dante’s Indiana: A Novel. Windsor: Biblioasis, 2022. 280 pp.
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. Original Prin: A Novel. Windsor: Biblioasis, 2018. 224 pp.
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. “When Literary Politics Mattered to Geopolitics.” American Literary History 28.3 (2016): 634-643.
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square New York: Random House, 2015. 480 pp.
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. “Sister Saint Maisie Connecticut.” Image 86(2015): 7-16.
- Boyagoda,Soharn Randy. “Reading Faulkner in and Beyond Postcolonial Studies: ‘There is no where for us to go but east,’” The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. John T. Matthews, Editor. New York and London: Cambridge University Press (2015): 204-219.
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. Beggar’s Feast: A Novel. Toronto:Penguin, 2011; Colombo, Sri Lanka: Perera-Hussein, 2011; New Delhi, IN: Harper Collins, India, 2012; New York: Penguin USA, 2012; London, UK: Penguin,UK, 2014. 336 pp.
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. “Preface to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition” of Doing Well and Doing Good: The Challenge to the Christian Capitalist, by Richard John Neuhaus. New York: Random House (2012): xi-xiv.
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. “There Are No Coconut Trees in Toronto,” in Reality Imagined: Stories of Identity and Change. Candice Fung, Janet E. McIntosh,Ken Whytock, Editors. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson (2011): 24-32.
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. “A Deus Ex Machina in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Displaced Person.’” The Southern Literary Journal 43.1 (2010): 59-74.
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. Race, Immigration and American Identity in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner. New York: Routledge, 2008. 143 pp.
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. “Digital Conversion Experiences in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis” Studies in American Culture 30.1
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. Governor of the Northern Province: A Novel. Toronto: Penguin, 2006. 231 pp.
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. “From St. Augustine to Salman Rushdie: Time and Narrative in Postcolonial and Pluralist Literatures.” Postcolonial Text 1.1 (2004): online journal.
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. “Just Where and What is ‘the (comparatively speaking) South’? Caribbean Writers on Melville and Faulkner. Mississippi Quarterly 57.1(2003): 65-74.
- Boyagoda, Soharn Randy. “Three Kings of Disorient: A Globalized Search for Home in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet”South Asian Review.