Background Details of Yasmine Goonerathne

Yasmine Gooneratne  

Source: Wikipedia

Yasmine Gooneratne (born 1935) is a Sri Lankan poet, short story writer, university professor, essayist. She is popular in Sri Lanka due to her patriotic works in the field of literature. Currently, she resides in Australia. 

Gooneratne was educated at some popular universities such as the University of Ceylon and Cambridge University. She now holds a personal chair in English and works as a Professor of the Macquarie University which is situated in Sydney, New South Wales.

Yasmine Gooneratne married a Sri Lankan physician, Brendan Gooneratne in 1962. They have two children.  

She was appointed Officer of Order of Australia in 1990 by the Australian government for her distinguished services to literature and education. In fact, she is the only Sri Lankan to have received this honour. She received Ph.D from Cambridge University in 1962.

Literature career

Yasmine Gooneratne has been one of the leading contributors to the English literature in Sri Lanka. She is most notable for the poem, Big Match 1983 which describes the situation caused by the Black July riots and pogrom in Sri Lanka. The poem is based on real events that took place in 1983.

Gooneratne has published about 16 books with themes of patriotism and literary criticism. Her very first novel A Change of Skies (1991) won the 1991 Marjorie Barnard Literacy award for fiction and was shortlisted for the 1991 Commonwealth Fiction Prize. In 2008, she was nominated for International Dublin Literary Award for the novel The Sweet and Simple Kind.