Convocation Speaker Randy Boyagoda Honorary Degree Recipient Friday, June 21, 2024, 3:00 p.m.
Across his academic and leadership work in universities, Boyagoda has pursued an intersecting career as a novelist, cultural commentator, and literary critic. In addition to a scholarly study of writers William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Salman Rushdie, and a biography of the neoconservative intellectual and Catholic priest, Richard John Neuhaus, Boyagoda has published four novels. Governor of the Northern Province (2006) is the story of an African warlord who moves to Canada and becomes a convenience store clerk. Beggar’s Feast is the story of a runaway Sri Lankan boy monk who becomes an international shipping magnate with three wives and 16 children. Original Prin (2018), the first in a trilogy, is the story of a bike-riding Sri Lankan Catholic English professor who travels to the Middle East to open a satellite campus for his failing college. The second book in the trilogy, Dante’s Indiana is the story of an evangelical millionaire who opens a Dante theme park in an opioid-ravaged small town in the middle of America. Later this year, Boyagoda will publish his first novel for young readers, Little Sanctuary , the story of elite children from the Global South sent to a secret school for safekeeping while the world falls apart. His fiction has generated international acclaim, prize nominations, popular appeal, and scholarly study. Boyagoda is also a regular contributor of essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times , the Atlantic , the Financial Times of London , the Times Literary Supplement , the Walrus , and The Globe and Mail . He has become a prominent voice on subjects including religion, politics, literature, culture, and freedom of expression and appears frequently on CBC Radio. From 2015-2017, he served as President of PEN Canada. Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife, Anna, and their four daughters.
Randy Boyagoda is a writer, critic and scholar. Born to Sri Lankan immigrants in Oshawa, Ontario, he received an Honors Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto in 1999 and a PhD in English from Boston University in 2005. Following a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, Boyagoda returned to Canada and taught at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) for ten years, during which he also served as both Chair of the English Department and as the founding director of Zone Learning. In 2016, Boyagoda was named Principal and Vice-President of the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, where he also held the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. A Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Boyagoda has since served as Vice-Dean, Undergraduate in the Faculty of Arts and Science, Acting Vice-Provost, Faculty & Academic Life, and as the university’s first Advisor on Civil Discourse.
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