2018. Boyagoda is now researching the relationship between transnationalism and nationalism in the creation of the "Great American Novel,” in addition to working on a sequel to Original Prin, titled Dante’s Indiana, anticipated September 2021. Boyagoda is a chair on Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury. Boyagoda lives in Toronto’s East End with his wife and four daughters. Work Boyagoda's first novel, Governor of the Northern Province, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and published to national acclaim. The deeply satirical novel told the tale of Sam Bokarie, an ex–African warlord who moves to small-town Canada to capitalize on its zealous hospitality. Books in Canada commented, "In his take-no-prisoners novel about politics, immigration, and rock-solid Canadian naiveté, Randy Boyagoda emerges as the Evelyn Waugh of the North." It was described by the National Post as an "auspicious debut." His second book, a monograph based on his doctoral dissertation, was published in 2008. In this book, he argues that the work of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner reveals a century-long transformation of how American identity and experience have been imagined, and that these transformations have been provoked by new forms of immigration and by unanticipated mixings of cultures and ethnic groups. His scholarly work (on such authors as Herman Melville, Don DeLillo, and Flannery O'Connor) has also appeared in journals including the Southern Literary Journal, Studies in American Culture, and South Asian Review. Boyagoda's second novel, Beggar's Feast, has been published around the world to critical acclaim, by Penguin Canada in 2011, Perera-Hussain (Sri Lanka) and Penguin US in 2012, Harper-Collins India in 2013, and Penguin UK in 2014. Told in four parts, the novel traces the story of Sam Kandy, who is born to low prospects in a Ceylon village in 1899 and dies a hundred years later as the wealthy headman of the same village—a self-made shipping magnate and the father of 16 who's been married three times and widowed twice. Praised by The Globe and Mail as "a post-colonial Gatsby", Sam Kandy is the center of a novel about family, pride, and ambition. Shelagh Rogers of CBC Radio called the novel "swashbuckling", while the National Post described Boyagoda's narrative voice as being "as lush as the tropical landscape of Ceylon" and the New York Times described it as "a gleaming novel that tells the tale of a Ceylonese Odysseus." Beggar's Feast was nominated for the 2012