Ambalavaner Sivanandan, commonly referred to as A Sivanandan or "Siva", was a Sri Lankan Tamil and British novelist, activist and writer, emeritus director of the Institute of Race Relations, a London-based independent educational charity.
10 Facts About Ambalavaner Sivanandan
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The son of Ambalavaner, a worker in the postal system who came from the village of Sandilipay in Jaffna in the north of the island of Sri Lanka, Sivanandan was educated at St Joseph's College, Colombo.
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Ambalavaner Sivanandan went on to teach in the Ceylon "Hill Country" and then worked for the Bank of Ceylon, where he became one of the first "native" bank managers.
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On coming to the UK, after a spell as a clerk in Vavasseur and Co and unable to obtain work in banking, Ambalavaner Sivanandan took a job in Middlesex libraries and retrained as a librarian.
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Ambalavaner Sivanandan worked variously in public libraries, for the Colonial Office library and in 1964 was appointed chief librarian at the Institute of Race Relations in central London.
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The library on race relations built up by Ambalavaner Sivanandan was, in 2006, moved to the University of Warwick Library, where it is known as the Ambalavaner Sivanandan Collection.
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Ambalavaner Sivanandan was regarded as one of the leading political thinkers in the UK.
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Ambalavaner Sivanandan was highly critical of some trends in modern leftism, such as the New Times political initiative of Marxism Today in the late 1980s, and of Postmodernism.
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Ambalavaner Sivanandan published an epic novel on Sri Lanka entitled When Memory Dies, which won the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Prize and the Sagittarius Prize.
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Ambalavaner Sivanandan died in London on 3 January 2018, aged 94.