Jean Arasanayagam is an English-language poet and fiction writer. The theme in her work is ethnic and religious turmoil in Sri Lanka. Her husband, Thiyagarajah Arasanayagam and their two daughters, Devasundari and Parvathi, all share the same passion for writing, one, Parvathi has taken after Jean. She has made a mark of her own as a poet/writer.

Background

Arasanayagam is a Dutch Burgher

Burgher people

The Burghers are a Eurasian ethnic group, historically from Sri Lanka, consisting for the most part of male-line descendants of European colonists from the 16th to 20th centuries and local women, with some minorities of Swedish, Norwegian, French and Irish.Today the mother tongue of the Burghers...

, the term for offspring of Dutchmen and indigenous women.

Works

Poetry

• Kindura (1973)
• Poems of Season Beginning and a Season Over (1977)
• Apocalypse '83 (1984)
• The Cry of the Kite (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)
• Nallur
• ruined gopuram
• mother-in-law

Prose

• The Cry of the Kite (A collection of short stories) (Kandy, 1984)
• The Outsider (Nagasaki University: Bulletin of the Faculty of Liberal Arts, 1989)
• Fragments of a Journey (Colombo : WERC, 1992)
• All is Burning (New Delhi : Penguin Books India, 1995)
• Peacocks and Dreams (New Delhi : Navrang, 1996)

External links

• Literary Encyclopedia page
• SAWNET: Bookshelf: Jean Arasanayagam