Golden State Today

Sonali Deraniyagala, whose family perished in a 2004 tsunami while on vacation in Sri Lanka, shared her journey of writing about unimaginable loss during an episode of Berkeley Talks. "I'm an accidental writer ... I was writing to make sense of, firstly, what had happened," said Deraniyagala.

In the devastating event that struck the South Asian island, Deraniyagala lost her husband, two sons, and parents. She was left grappling with a reality she could not comprehend. In Berkeley Talks episode 201, she discussed her profound grief following the tragedy and the process of documenting it in her 2013 memoir, Wave.

“Wave was the wave was the wave,” said Deraniyagala during an April 2024 event for Art of Writing, a program by UC Berkeley’s Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities. “What mattered was the loss. It could have been a tree. It just happened to be the wave. I wasn’t that interested in how it happened. It was more this otherworldly situation where I had a life; I didn’t have a life, and it took 10 minutes between the two."

Deraniyagala elaborated on her experience: “So that I was trying to figure out, and I think the whole book Wave was trying to: Everything you know vanishes in an instant, literally in an instant, with no warning… I experienced something that I didn’t have words for. I didn’t know what was happening when it was happening, which is why I was sure I was dreaming.”

An economist teaching at both the University of London and Columbia University, Deraniyagala described herself as “an accidental writer.” She recounted how her therapist initially urged her to write as a means to make sense of her immense loss—a task she found difficult to articulate or put into sentences.

Speaking with Ramona Naddaff, Berkeley associate professor of rhetoric and founding director of Art of Writing during their conversation at the event, Deraniyagala explained how through meticulous writing and rewriting over eight years she eventually found her voice. Her memoir Wave went on to become a New York Times bestseller and won the PEN Ackerley Prize in 2013.

A video recording of their April 10 conversation followed by a Q&A session with the audience is available for viewing.

Learn more about UC Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities’ Art of Writing program.