What Draws a Playwright to Hesse? Shakthidharan on Siddhartha

By Andy — 2026-08-26 — Literary News

I heard S. Shakthidharan discuss *Siddhartha* on the Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast recently. It struck me—not because playwrights don't read novels, but because here's a writer who could be almost anywhere, creatively, and he chose to sit with Hesse.

Shakthidharan was born in Sri Lanka and raised in Sydney, Australia, where he currently lives. His work draws heavily from his own diaspora experience. *Counting and Cracking*, the play that defined his reputation, is an epic spanning nearly five decades and multiple locations. It's ambitious in scale. So is *Siddhartha*, actually, but in a completely different register—one man's inward journey rather than a family's outward displacement. Yet there's something in Hesse's novel that apparently mattered enough to discuss in a public conversation.

The version Shakthidharan was talking about is Hilda Rosner's translation. That detail matters more than it sounds.

Translators don't get their names on spines often enough. But Rosner's *Siddhartha* is the one most readers encounter in English—it's the standard, the one that shaped how English-speaking audiences understood Hesse's engagement with Buddhism and self-discovery. It's readable without being simplified. Meditative without becoming pretentious. Actually, that's not quite right. It's meditative *and* direct, which is harder than it sounds.

What does a writer like Shakthidharan find in a book like this? Not, I suspect, the spiritual tourism some readers bring to *Siddhartha*. Not the "find yourself" self-help angle. Shakthidharan is a rare storyteller whose work traverses time and space while remaining anchored in core emotional truths. That's how the Windham-Campbell judges described him. It's also, frankly, how you might describe what Hesse is doing in *Siddhartha*—crossing centuries and philosophical systems while staying rooted in something true about human wanting, human doubt.

There's a usefulness to Hesse for people writing seriously about migration, about being between worlds. Siddhartha is between worlds too, though his are spiritual rather than geographic. He leaves his people. He learns another way of seeing. He ends up alone by a river, watching water repeat itself endlessly. The specificity is generic enough to speak to almost anyone's displacement.

But I wonder if what really interests Shakthidharan is the form—or anti-form, rather. *Siddhartha* doesn't argue. It doesn't persuade. It shows a man thinking in real time, making terrible choices, learning nothing until suddenly he understands everything. That's closer to how plays actually work than, say, a conventional realist novel. There's almost a dramatic rhythm to it. The encounters feel staged.

Hesse published *Siddhartha* in 1922. A century later, a Sri Lankan-Australian playwright recording a podcast about it in English. That's not a failing of the book—it's proof the thing has something. Not everything survives translation, distance, time.

Source: "Shakthidharan is a rare storyteller whose work traverses time and space while remaining anchored in core emotional truths." — Windham-Campbell Prizes