The Naming of Names

Shortlisted for the 2025 Derek Walcott Prize
Over 100,000 Tamil civilians were killed during the Sri Lankan civil war, their deaths often dismissed as collateral damage. What happens to names once the person who wore them dies? When there is no one left alive who remembers the laughter they once carried. In the ordinary course of a life every syllable of a name would be fully used up: a full life led. The violence of war doesn't merely decimate the physical body: it shocks into silence names, lineages and history. This book is a tender exhumation of the lyricism of Tamil names: of flowers, the moon and stars; of beauty, music and grace.
Expanding upon the work in her powerful and moving 2021 pamphlet From a Borrowed Land, Shash Trevett's The Naming of Names bears witness to the Tamil experience during the Sri Lankan civil war through poetry that spans a broad range of responses to this violent and tragic history.

Shash Trevett is a Tamil from Sri Lanka who came to the UK to escape the civil war. She is a poet and a translator of Tamil poetry into English. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies and journals (including Poetry, Poetry London and The North), she has read widely across the UK and is a winner of a Northern Writers' Award. Her pamphlet From a Borrowed Land was published in 2021 by Smith|Doorstop.
Shash has been on judging panels for the PEN Translates awards and the London Book Fair, and was a Visible Communities Translator in Residence at the National Centre for Writing. Shash is a Ledbury Critic, reviewing for PN Review and the Poetry Book Society and is a Board Member of Modern Poetry in Translation. She is co-editor with Vidyan Ravinthiran and Seni Seneviratne of the anthology Out of Sri Lanka (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.