Randy Boyagoda: Take a Long View of Your Writing Life
In this interview, author Randy Boyagoda discusses globalizing the campus novel with his new book, Lords of Serendipity.
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist who writes about books and ideas for publications including The Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Financial Times of London. His fiction has been nominated for the Giller Prize and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection and Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. He is a professor of English at the University of Toronto. Learn more at RandyBoyagoda.com.
In this interview, Randy discusses globalizing the campus novel with his new book, Lords of Serendipity, his hope for readers, and more.
Name: Randy Boyagoda
Literary agent: Karolina Sutton, CAA
Book title: Lords of Serendipity
Publisher: Mariner Books
Release date: September 8, 2026
Genre/category: Literary fiction
Previous titles: Dante’s Indiana, Original Prin, Beggar’s Feast, Governor of the Northern Province, Little Sanctuary
Elevator pitch: A Sri Lankan village girl dreams of going to Harvard and then does whatever it takes to get in. This puts her in orbit with fellow strivers, and also hustlers, gatekeepers, academic stars, and psychotically supportive parents in the contemporary United States and Sri Lanka.
What prompted you to write this book?
I went to college in 1995 and I’ve never left. While writing fiction along the way, I’ve been an undergraduate student, graduate student, postdoctoral fellow, professor, vice-dean, vice-provost, advisor on civil discourse, and director of a research institute, and now the parent of college students. Along the way, I’ve gained a lot of insights and experiences about the gong-show-circus-of-humanity we call higher education. At the same time, I’ve noticed how limited, how limiting, campus fictions tend to be. Why? Because they tend to be about beefing undergraduates sleeping with each other while incompetent professors futz around trying to do the same. Sure, that happens, but there’s so much more going on, on and off campus.
By comparison …
Lords of Serendipity is a global campus novel, a novel about people from all over the world, privileged and poor alike, sharing the same idea, the same obsession, really: If I can just get into a top school, the rest of my life is going to be amazing. The novel reveals how places like Harvard depend on the dreams of a Sri Lankan village girl and on her father cleaning toilets at a 5-star hotel in Colombo to pay for those dreams.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I’ve been working on versions of this book—a novel that considers college life and the state of universities, the state of higher education, in a global frame, from the perspectives of children and their parents—for 10 years. Over the past five years especially, different elements of the story started coming together.
The idea really began to develop into a big, multi-perspective, globe-spanning story for two reasons. First, I met a professor of Statistics at the University of Toronto, where I teach, who read Ulysses on his lunch. I can’t think of any English professors who read Ulysses on their lunch, can you? But this got me thinking about a soulful and curious person stuck teaching data to indifferent students. Second, I heard rumors of a TA in a massive Statistics course selling guaranteed grades to desperate international students …
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
As anyone reading this knows, higher education has been making news in dramatic and controversial ways in recent years. Lords of Serendipity had encampments in it before encampments began showing up on college campuses; it already had storylines about the high costs of going to college; the predatory interests of universities in international students; the rise of Artificial Intelligence and its effects on teaching and research, and on staff jobs. I mention these as instances, among many, of the unexpected timeliness of the novel, alongside the more timeless elements—what parents are willing to do for their children; what does it mean, and take, for a young woman to make her way through a tempting and hard world—which, in turn, meant the novel generated a lot of publishing interest very quickly when it went out on submission in early 2025.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I was surprised by how Devi, the Sri Lankan village girl who dreams of going to Harvard, started as a minor character in a subplot, and very quickly, alongside the rest of her family, became far more of the major focus. I think this happened because her drive, her whole family’s drive, commanded the full treatment it received in the end.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope they laugh and shudder. I hope they care about whether Devi’s going to get into Harvard and then wonder if it’s worth it for anyone who tries. Some 50,000 people apply to top schools like Harvard every year. We usually hear stories about the ones who get in, and the ones who just missed the cut. What about the people at the very bottom of the list, who dream and work just as hard as everybody else?
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Take a long view of your writing life. I published my first novel, in Canada, in 2006. Twenty years later, after publishing several others in Canada, I’m publishing a novel in the United States for the first time, a book that’s being published, in fact, all around the world this fall. I couldn’t have predicted this shape to my career 20 years ago, but regardless, I kept reading and writing. And I’m grateful and happy my career’s taken exactly this shape, on this timeline.
Also, please note the pairing, above: reading and writing. No matter their age, profile, or interests, writers need to read more and write less, always.
