Two acclaimed novelists flown to GLF

Two internationally acclaimed novelists of Sri Lankan origin will be flown to the country of their birth by Emirates later this month, as part of the award-winning airline’s support to the Galle Literary Festival, which takes place from January 28 to February 1.

Australia-based Michelle de Kretser and US-based Ru Freeman will join an eminent group of international writers in the fortress city of Galle for this year’s festival, the fourth in the series.

“Emirates is pleased to sponsor the travel of these two accomplished authors, whose work has sparked much literary interest in Sri Lanka,” said Chandana de Silva, Emirates Area Manager Sri Lanka and Maldives.

“As an airline that has served Colombo for nearly two and a half decades, Emirates is also happy to support the Galle Literary Festival, which helps promote Sri Lanka as a destination.”

Emirates is a Gold Sponsor of the 2010 Galle Literary Festival.

This is the third year that the Dubai-based international carrier is supporting this annual event. Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and emigrated to Australia when she was 14.

She is the author of The Hamilton Case, the winner of the Tasmania Pacific Prize, the Encore Award (UK) and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Southeast Asia and Pacific); The Rose Grower (her first novel) and The Lost Dog which was long-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for fiction.

The Hamilton Case was also shortlisted for the SA Premier’s Fiction Award, the Victorian Premier’s Award.Ru Freeman, whose debut novel A Disobedient Girl has already received high praise, won several awards for her writing when she was still in Sri Lanka, including a Presidential Award for creative writing.

Hailing from a family of writers (both her father, Gamini Seneviratne and brother, Malinda Seneviratne, are poets and writers), Ru Freeman now lives in Bala Cynwyd, Philadelphia, with her husband and three young daughters.

In 2009, more than 3000 visitors from Sri Lanka and overseas came together in Galle for the third Galle Literary Festival. Travel writer Pico Iyer said of his time at the Festival: ‘Lush tropical gardens, a mysterious walled city unique in Asia, long lunches with literary superstars and huge crowds of readers from across the globe: is it any wonder that every writer longs for an invitation to the Galle Literary Festival, already one of the literary jewels in Asia’s crown?”

The winner of more than 400 international awards, Emirates has been serving Sri Lanka since April 1986 and operates 22 flights a week from Colombo, 18 of them westward to Dubai and Male, and four eastward to Singapore.