The Gratiaen Prize
awarded for the best work of creative writing in English by a Sri Lankan citizen resident in Sri Lanka
THE WINNER OF THE 31st PRIZE
The Short List
A Passing Return - Pasan Jayasinghe
Gnanam - Selvi Sachithanandam
Students and Rebels - Vihanga Perera
When Ghosts Die - Lal Medawattegedara
The Judges
Dr. Anthony Joseph
(Chair of the Jury)
Dr Anthony Joseph F.R.S.L. who chairs the Gratiaen Prize jury this year is an award winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. His 2022 collection Sonnets for Albert won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2022 and the OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Poetry. He is the author of four previous poetry collections and three novels. His 2018 novel Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction. In 2019, he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. His most recent fiction is the experimental novel The Frequency of Magic. As a musician, he has released eight critically acclaimed albums, and in 2020 received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Composers Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kings College, London.
Photo credits: Naomi Woddis
Dr. Ruvani Ranasinha
(The Academic)
Dr. Ruvani Ranasinha, the academic on the jury, is Professor of Global Literature at the Department of English, King’s College London. She specialises in postcolonial literature and theory, especially relating to South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford, and is the author of South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (Oxford University Press, 2007), Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women’s Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation (Palgrave 2016) and the lead editor of South Asians Shaping the Nation, 1870-1950: A Sourcebook (Manchester University Press, 2012). With Alex Tickell she also co-edited Delhi: New Literatures on the Megacity (Routledge 2020). Her most recent book is the first biography of the British Asian writer Hanif Kureishi: Writing the Self (MUP 2023).
Angeline Ondaatjie
(The Informed Reader)
Angeline Ondaatjie is the informed reader on the jury. She is a renowned hotelier with over three decades of diverse experience in tourism, financial services and the manufacturing sector. She holds a Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Materials Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. During her undergraduate years, she pursued her passion for literature and the arts by studying Comparative World Literature at both Harvard and MIT. Committed to academia and educational initiatives, Angeline serves on the Education Council of MIT and is a Country Advisor to Princeton Asia.