Premchand Fellowship of India to Sri Lankan writer
Poet and novelist Yasmine Gooneratne has been awarded the prestigious
Premchand Fellowship 2012 by SahityaAkademi, New Delhi, India.
Sahitya Akademi, India instituted the Fellowship in the name of the
Indian writer on the 125th birth anniversary to be annually offered to
persons of eminence in the field of culture and literature from SAARC
countries.
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Yasmine Gooneratne |
The period of Fellowship is three months and the recipient will be
the guest of SahityaAkademi during the period.
Born in Colombo, educated at the Universities of Ceylon and
Cambridge, Emeritus Professor Gooneratne has taught, researched and
published in the fields of English and Commonwealth/Postcolonial
Literature for 35 years.
On her return from Cambridge with a PhD in English, she taught at the
University of Ceylon in Peradeniya for 10 years (1962 - 1972) before
accepting a senior position at Macquarie University in Australia, where
she taught until her retirement from active teaching in 1999.
Her work as writer and teacher has been recognised by the award of a
Personal Chair in English as well as of Macquarie University’s first
higher doctoral degree (Dlitt).
She has been honoured in three countries by conferment of the Order
of Australia (AO), the Samvad India Foundation’s Raja Rao Award and the
Sahityaratna (‘Jewel of Literature’) Award of Sri Lanka.
Patron since 1990 ofthe Jane Austen Society of Australia, she is
today the Director of The Guardian Angels, a literary editing service,
and a member of both the Australian Society of Authors and the English
Writers’ Cooperative of Sri Lanka.
All her novels (including the first, which won Australia’s Marjorie
Barnard Literary Prize for Fiction) have been shortlisted for
international prizes, among them the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the
Dublin IMPAC International Prize.
She authored novels such as A Change of Skies,The Pleasures of
Conquest and The Sweet and Simple Kind.
She has also published four volumes of poetry.
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