Kuruvilla autographs copies of his play Rice Boy at a bookstore in Stratford.
sparred with self-doubt before letting himself dream of victory. If he didn’t find his calling as a playwright in the rows of the theatre, Kuruvilla certainly found it early on in the rows of books in the Waterloo Public Library, where he spent many hours as a child. He also found inspiration on his summer trips with his family to Kerala, India — one of the settings of Rice Boy. “Back then it was a chore,” Canadian-born Kuruvilla says of travelling to his parents’ homeland. “I didn’t like the food. My mom had to convince my sister and me to go by packing Kraft Dinner and peanut butter for us.” But from the moment he started weaving these personal experiences into his stories at the age of 10, writing became a way of life. His father encouraged him to enter the first story he wrote in the library’s Dorothy Shoemaker Literary contest. He won the contest six years in a row. At 15, while he was “flunking” Grade 10 math, Kuruvilla won the Shankar International Literary Contest, placing first out of 20,000 entries. The next year he did it again and won a trip to meet the president of India.
He’s surpassingly polite, but at the same time it was clear to me that he was in control of his part in the conversation.
Kuruvilla’s parents encouraged him to pursue writing, so he studied English at Laurier, where his father, P.K. Kuruvilla, was a political science professor. “I wasn’t the greatest student,” admits Kuruvilla. “I remember going to the library to write a critical essay on a literary work and instead coming away with a short story I’d written.” After Laurier, he began a master’s degree in English and creative writing at the University of Windsor. His thesis advisor, noted Canadian author Alistair McLeod, encouraged him to keep writing plays. Kuruvilla spent nine years after his master’s degree winning awards for his plays and stories, securing staged readings and productions, and working as a playwright-in-residence, all the while holding down a full-time job as a communications writer at Laurier. Then in 1998, the Canadian Council for the Arts
- Yale director Liz Diamond
LAURIER CAMPUS Summer 2009
17