Jean Arasanayagam

Jean Arasanayagam

Jean Arasanayagam (b. 1931, nee Solomons) is arguably Sri Lanka’s most widely read and anthologized poet publishing in the English language. She is of Dutch-Burgher origin and along with spouse Thiagarajah and daughter Parvathi forms one of Sri Lanka’s most reputed writer-families. Best known as a poet, Jean is also a writer of short fiction, fiction and memoir. Her writing in all genres are marked with a distinct and powerful biographical element.

Among Jean’s more memorable collections of poetry are interventions she makes on matters of identity, heritage, displacement, fragmentation and ethnic-politics. In particular, her collection Apocalypse 83 (1984) was a turning point in her career as a poet and remains to date her most widely quoted work for its acute political sensitivity, strong line of protest against anti-Tamil violence of post-independence and the focus it specifically lays on the riots of July 1983. Jean has also written extensively of her own identity displacement as a Dutch Burgher in a post-colonial world  which is further complicated by her marriage to a traditional Jaffna Tamil family. Among her 40-odd titles are poetry collections such as Kindura (1973), Poems of Season Beginning and a Season Over (1977), Apocalypse ’83 (1984), A Colonial Inheritance and Other Poems (1985), Out of Our Prisons We Emerge (1987), Trial by Terror (1987), Reddened Waters Flow Clear (1991), Shooting the Floricans (1993), Fussilade (2003),   Mind Zones (2010). Her more recent work display a penchant for revision and introspection. She was awarded the Gratiaen Prize in 2017 for her collection, The Life of a Poet.

As a writer of fiction, Jean is best applauded for her perceptive, retrospective and nostalgically nuanced prose-biography of which A Nice Burgher Girl (2006) forms a much-referred to high point. It can best be described as an intersection between memoir and historical commentary, while being an honest and intimate valuation of her times growing up in colonial and post-independence Ceylon / Sri Lanka. Her other fictional works of repute include The Cry of the Kite (1984), The Outsider (1989) and Fragments of a Journey (1992), All is Burning (1995), Peacocks and Dreams (1996), In the Garden, Secretly (2000), Inheritance (2001),  The Dividing Line (2002), The Famished Waterfall (2004), One Evening (2006) and Dragons in the Wilderness (2007). Jean has also been an Honorary Fellow in the Creative Activities of the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa in 1990 and an International Writer-in-Residence in the South West University (1994) and a Visiting Fellow at Exeter University’s Faculty of Arts.

Jean has been educated at Girls’ High School, Kandy and the University of Ceylon. She has been conferred a D.Litt by the University of Visual and Performance Arts (Sri Lanka) and an M.Litt in Literary Linguistics by the University of Stratchlyde, Glasgow.