Judges for 32nd Gratiaen Prize
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The Gratiaen Trust, in association with the John Keells Foundation, has announced its panel of judges for Sri Lanka’s most prestigious literary award for creative writing in English, the 32nd Gratiaen Prize, as well as the panel of judges for the HAIG Prize for Translations.
The Gratiaen panel is chaired by Gregory Pardlo, an internationally acclaimed poet, essayist and educator. Pardlo is the author of Spectral Evidence, which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award and Digest, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other works include Totem and Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. Pardlo’s contributions to literature have earned him numerous accolades, including fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Currently, he is the Head of the Literature and Creative Writing Programme at NYU Abu Dhabi, dividing his time between New York and the United Arab Emirates.
Dr Crystal Baines brings a scholarly perspective to the judging process. She holds a BA in English from the University of Peradeniya and a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research focuses on the intersections of secularisation narratives and Buddhist thought in twentieth-century South Asian literature. She is a researcher affiliated with the Social Scientists Association in Colombo and a Visiting Lecturer in the University of Colombo’s Department of English.
Representing the informed general reader is Savithri Rodrigo, an award-winning journalist with over 37 years of experience in the media. She is a Fellow of the ICSA (UK) and ICCSL (SL).
This year, the Gratiaen Trust will also present the HAIG Prize for Translation, a biennial award recognising exceptional translations from Sinhala or Tamil into English. The judging panel for this award comprises Shash Trevett, a poet, critic, and translator of Tamil poetry. Trevett is the co-editor of ‘Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas’ which has been recognised as one of the Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year for 2023. Her translations are included in the Cambridge IGCSE and A Level syllabi. Dr. Krishantha Fredricks is a Senior Lecturer in Sinhala language, Literature and Linguistics at the University of Colombo; a linguistic anthropologist, also a poet, painter, and translator. Dileepa Abeysekera is a creative professional in advertising and literary translator best known for his Sinhala adaptations of Shehan Karunatilaka’s celebrated novels, Chinaman (2015) and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2023).
For further details about the Gratiaen Prize, the HAIG Prize for Translation, and the upcoming awards ceremony, please see www.gratiaen.com.
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