In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, the award-winning playwright and author S. Shakthidharan, who is known as Shakthi, chats with me about his choices while crafting, Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath, which was shortlisted for the 2026 National Biography Award.
Winner: 2026 Multicultural NSW Award.
Shortlisted: 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Award.
Shortlisted: 2026 National Biography Award.
Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath
Shakthi began writing Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath at the age of 40. The catalyst was realising, while he juggled caring for his two young children and dying father, that he was experiencing genuine belonging inside a family for the first time.
The story’s central image is a house built by Shakthi’s great-grandparents in Sri Lanka. It becomes a symbolic anchor as the family flees to Australia because of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Shakthi’s grandmother had the house carried brick by brick across the ocean to Western Sydney. Shakthi now lives in this house with his family; his sons sleep on their great-grandparents’ beds. ‘It’s not a metaphor’, Shakthi says, ‘though it functions as one anyway’. It is a structure that has been, for him, ‘as much a suffocating chokehold as it has been a glorious sanctuary’.
Living and Breathing between Truths
The memoir’s title comes from Shakthi’s Hindu wedding ceremony. Hindu tradition required him to face his community rather than his bride, an entire room of everyone he loved, gathered in one glance. This structural insight shaped the memoir. He wrote second-person addresses to the people closest to him: his mother, partner, late father and sons. This form creates, as Shakthi describes it: ‘A space that is neither inside ‘I’ or ‘you’, but in the space between.’
In lyrical prose, Shakthidharan examines what it is like to be an artist, father, son and husband in modern Australia, straining to come to terms with painful absences and a deep need for reconciliation. His use of second person offers an intimate insight into both interior and real landscapes of exile and alienation.
Judges: 2026 National Biography Award.
Crucially, Shakthi allowed his family to help shape their own chapters, giving them agency over what was told rather than simply speaking for them. The book resists a single, tidy truth, instead letting competing versions of the same history sit side by side: his mother’s truth beside his own and his father’s beside his. It closes with his sons playing on the same porch his great-grandfather once sat on in Sri Lanka. The two little boys were steering an imagined ship through a storm.
Particularly striking was the author’s magnificent tribute to his dying father as they struggle side-by-side towards some kind of ending, his children sitting on their great-great-grandfather’s porch, ‘guiding it through a wild storm’. A beautifully written memoir debut from an acclaimed playwright.
Judges: 2026 National Biography Award.
What Shakthi has created in Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath is much more than a chronicle of migration or family rupture. It is a demonstration of how a shattered history can be reassembled into something whole, even if the reassembled version only partly resembles the original. Shakthi’s eloquence inspires us to consider the narratives we each hold within our own lives.
Praise: Gather Up Your World In One Long Breath
A memoir is as much about rebuilding identity as it is about familial ties, Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath comes from a deeply felt place. S. Shakthidharan, hitherto best known as a playwright, tells us his story using the same second-person pronoun to address various family members in alternating chapters. The book traces his mother’s journey from her youth as a dancer in Paris to suburban Sydney, where she and her son find themselves once again living together under the same roof of their old home, which has been dismantled and sent from Sri Lanka.
How can we hold on to the past, while moving forward? Shakthidharan deftly interrogates such ideas through incisive reflections as a son, father and husband. The result is a lyrical account that expands the genre of memoir with its own distinctive stamp. At its core is the metaphor of the family home, both figurative and literal.
This is a book that examines what happens when a child becomes a father and has to navigate the past to make sense of his future. Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath is breathtaking in its reach to contain a multitude of stories not only about Sri Lankan culture and diaspora, but about relationships across generations. Shakthidharan’s storytelling is woven from many strands that braid together to present a complex, nuanced picture of sacrifice, forgiveness, compassion and duty.
Judges: 2026 Multicultural NSW Award
‘Raw, unflinching and mesmerisingly honest … Poetic and profound. Shakthidharan excavates the intricate layers of his family’s history, revealing the complexities of filial love, the weight of inherited trauma, and the search for belonging.
This is both an artist’s journey and a son’s.’
Shankari Chandran, Author Of Miles Franklin Award Winner,
Chai Time At Cinnamon Gardens
‘Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath is a rich exploration of the mystery of finding Australia. In a voice “as old and true as the soil beneath you”, Shakthidharan retells his family’s movement from Sri Lanka to Sydney, and their quest to start over.
The exuberance of life in a new continent is balanced by failure, separation and loss.
I loved it.’
Aravind Adiga, Author Of Booker Prize Winner: The White Tiger
‘A beautiful and powerful exploration of the intensity and immutability of being a part of a family and coming to terms with accepting love. Lyrical, wise and moving, some parts of this book made me gather my world in one long breath.’
Alice Pung, Author Of Unpolished Gem and Her Father’s Daughter
‘Loss, and joy, echoes through this tender, brave and unusual portrait of one family, and literally one house, that moved across two lands.’
Sonali Deraniyagala, Author Of Wave: A Memoir Of Life After The Tsunami
‘A luminous and unflinching memoir of exile, love and the weight of inheritance.’
Steve Toltz, Author Of Here Goes Nothing and A Fraction Of The Whole
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16 June 2025 Books + Publishing |
Powerhouse announces Shakthidharan memoir as first literary acquisition |
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6 September 2025 Weekend Australian |
To My Father |
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9 September 2025 Readings |
September Non-Fiction Review |
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20 September 2025 The Saturday Paper |
S. Shakthidharan Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath |
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20 September 2025 ABC Radio Sydney |
Sri Lanka to Sydney brick by brick: S Shakthidharan |
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22 September 2025 The Guardian |
His family home was shipped from Sri Lanka to Sydney and rebuilt. Now he’s telling its story |
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24 September 2025 The Radio National Hour |
The breakfast, lunch and dinner of my soul' S. Shakthidaran finds contentment in family chaos |
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9 April 2026 Broadsheet |
Just In: Sri Lankan Australian Playwright S Shakthidharan Wins Prestigious $250, |
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13 April 2026 7.30 Report |
VIDEO: Shakthi reveals long-held family secrets to his sons in dramatic memoir |
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11 July 2026 The Age |
Shakthidharan is rocking the boat – and he’s not sorry |
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12 July 2026 ABC Radio National |
The Year that Made Me: S. Shakthidharan, 2008 |
Photo credit: Alex Vaughan
Shakthidharan is a Western Sydney storyteller with Sri Lankan heritage and Tamil ancestry. He’s a writer, director and producer of theatre and film, and a composer of original music. His debut play, ‘Counting and Cracking’, was voted ‘the best Australian play of the 21st century’ in an ArtsHub poll, was called ‘one of the great Australian plays’ by The Guardian, and was a New York Times Critic’s Pick. The script won the Victorian Prize for Literature in the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting in the 2020 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. His latest play, ‘The Wrong Gods’, premiered in 2025.