The 30th Gratiaen Prize - Panel of Judges

Romesh Gunesekera (Chair)

Romesh Gunesekera, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is an internationally acclaimed author who, through his novels and short stories, explores the key themes of our times – political, ecological, economic. His fiction over the last thirty years include Reef, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1994, and The Match, a ground-breaking novel on cricket. Noontide Toll, a cycle of linked stories which captured a vital moment in post-war Sri Lanka, was published in 2014, while his most recent novel, Suncatcher, returned to an earlier era of 1960s Sri Lanka and a story of divided loyalties and endangered friendship. He chaired the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize jury and judged Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists (2013) amongst other literary competitions. A teacher of creative writing, he is the co-author of Novel Writing: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (2015). Romesh was born in Colombo and lives in London.

Sukanya Wignaraja

Sukanya Wignaraja is a psychotherapist and coach. An avid reader, she has a keen interest in literature, and in particular South Asian writing. She was educated at the universities of Edinburgh and Oxford. She has lived and worked in India, UK, the Philippines and Japan and was formerly an editor with Oxford University Press in New Delhi, a Specialist Advisor in Social Work with the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office in London, and a mental health professional in Manila and Tokyo.

Kaushalya Perera

Kaushalya Perera is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English, University of Colombo. She has a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Pennsylvania State University, USA, and is a Fulbright alum. Thoroughly bilingual, she writes in Sinhala and English on linguistics, higher education, and the Sinhala language, and has a great interest in literature.