In a quiet café in Athens, Lavan Jeyarupalingam is reading Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi as he writes to CE. His earliest reading nook was in the gap between two sofas in his parents’ living room, beneath a tall lamp. “I felt very safe and cosy there, and I could just escape into my stories,” he recalls.
That instinct to disappear into books has since become a way of drawing others into conversations about literature, colonialism, and who gets to decide what counts as great writing. Lavan, a British Sri Lankan Tamil actor and writer who creates book content online, has built an audience of more than 30k followers (@lavan.actor on Instagram) by encouraging readers to look beyond the authors and traditions they already know.
Hoping to build his acting profile, he started posting videos of himself discussing and performing Shakespeare. “My first reel where I talked about decolonising my reading list did really well. After that I leaned in more to the literature side, and now here we are,” he says.
The reading list he wanted to widen had once been dominated by white European men. Lavan still loves Hemingway, Orwell, and Fitzgerald, but he began to question why these writers had occupied so much of his reading life. “If I really wanted to understand the world and the people in it, the most important thing to do would be to see it from their perspective,” he says.
Growing up, he often felt between worlds. At university, studying English also made him conscious of the hierarchy that separates literary fiction from genre writing. Fantasy shaped his childhood, particularly Raymond E. Feist’s Magician, with its epic scale and morally complicated characters. Yet academic culture often looked down upon the very stories he loved. “The idea of what some elitist institution might consider great is not necessarily reflective of what’s truly great,” he says.
For him, widening the canon means following curiosity rather than replacing one fixed list with another. When he realised that all his favourite books were written by men, he deliberately sought out women writers. Over the following two years, about 80 per cent of the books he read were by women. He later turned towards translated literature and authors from the global majority. “I’m not an expert, I’m not an academic. I’m just a regular person who wanted to understand the world differently,” he says. He asks readers to examine the biases they may have absorbed through education and habit, then follow their curiosity into unfamiliar cultures and histories.
Politics between pages
The books he has yet to read are part of that process. Lavan encountered the idea of the “anti-library” in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, which refers to Umberto Eco’s thoughts on unread books. Rather than treating them as evidence of unfinished reading, he sees them as reminders of what remains to be discovered. "A pile of unread books on my table to me looks like possibility, excitement, adventure, new lessons learned, new ways to see the world," he says.
That outlook also informs the community he wants to build online. He discusses caste, class, colonialism, Palestine, capitalism, and Artificial Intelligence, but also speaks openly about abandoning books and struggling with difficult ones. He hopes readers can acknowledge injustice without losing the pleasure of discussing literature. “I think reading will always inherently be political; art is always inherently political,” he says. Yet he recognises that readers also turn to books for relief from an exhausting news cycle. The challenge, he suggests, is to remain aware of a book’s assumptions without feeling compelled to publicly condemn every work.
The language he reads in is English. He acknowledges the privilege of growing up with a language that carries global power, one that can make its colonial history easier to overlook. Perhaps that is why he resists prescribing books that will change a reader’s life.
An experience taught Lavan that a book’s significance often lies in the circumstances surrounding it. He recalls a university lecturer whose favourite book was an unremarkable 1980s science-fiction novel that a friend had lent him before a fire destroyed the friend’s home and library. “I often think that books will find us in the times that we need them. There’s been too many times in my life when I’ve randomly picked up a book off my shelf or from a charity shop and inside it, it’s contained the message that I needed to hear in that moment,” he says, adding that if asked to choose, he would keep the books he hasn’t read yet. “Because those are the ones that are going to change me the most.”
