Gratiaen Prize 2019 - Panel of Judges

Minoli Salgado (Chair)

Minoli Salgado is a creative writer and Professor of International Writing at Manchester

Metropolitan University and former Professor of English at the University of Sussex where she taught for many years. She has published widely in the field of postcolonial studies including an acclaimed book on Sri Lankan creative writing in English titled Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place (Routledge, 2007). Her fiction and poetry have been published internationally and include the novel, A Little Dust on the Eyes (Peepal Tree Press, 2014), which won the first SI Leeds Literary Prize, and the collection of short stories, Broken Jaw (The 87 Press, 2019), which was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. She is currently on a Leverhulme Research Fellowship working on a project on testimonial literature.

Tara Coomaraswamy

Tara Coomaraswamy has a B.A. Degree from the University of Cambridge in Western Classics and an M.A. and PhD from the University of Sussex, UK, in the Sociology of Politics. She has worked as a researcher at the Marga Institute, and for the Fellows of the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex and the Institute of Education, London. She has taught Greek & Roman Civilization and English at her old school, Ladies’ College, Colombo. Later in life, an interest in art and architecture led to her following a year-long course in the Arts of Medieval and Early Renaissance Europe at the V&A Museum, London. She is an avid reader of literature and has a keen interest in fine art and music.

Jake Oorloff

Jake Oorloff is a performance artist and theatre practitioner based in Sri Lanka. Over the last 12 years his writing for theatre, created against the backdrop of the war and the post-war environment, speaks for counter narratives, and is located within the context of art activism. Informed by storytelling practices, his recent theatre work Forgetting November and My Other History were created in response to conversations on reconciliation in the country. Recent performance work include Out of Silence commissioned by Hydra Poesis (Australia), and Othered Histories commissioned by the Colombo Art Biennale. 

In 2014 he was awarded a visiting fellowship by the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture, and in 2017 was appointed South Asian Studies Fellow at Cornell University. He is also the creative director of Floating Space Theatre Company, a collective he co-founded in 2007.