Vivimarie Vanderpoorten

She lists Kamala Das, Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds among authors who have influenced her, and Moshin Hamid, Khaled Hosseini Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jeanette Winterson as contemporary writers that she reads.[4]

Her poetry has been called "gentle, reflective minimalism which touches the soul" by Dr. Sinharaja Tammita-Delgoda, the chairman of the panel of judges who awarded her the Gratiaen Prize[3] Neloufer de Mel said, of her first book "nothing prepares you is a remarkable first book which announces the entry of a very talented poet onto the stage of Sri Lankan creative writing in English. Vanderpoorten’s poems have an impressive range of subject matter from the personal to the political and reflect saliently on issues of gender, race and class while offering us vivid contexts of love, loss, violence and joy. They exemplify a good command of rhyme and rhythm, and in their economy of utterance offer an enabling lucidity within which poet and reader can meet, and memorably so for the reader."

Her first book Nothing Prepares You was awarded the 2007 Gratiaen Prize[1] and the 2009 SAARC Poetry Award.[2] She won the State Literary Award for English poetry (sharing the award with another Sri Lankan poet, Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe) in October 2011.[7] Her third collection of poems, Borrowed Dust (in manuscript form) was shortlisted for the 2016 Gratiaen Prize. Her poetry is taught in a number of university courses and a poem from her first collection is currently on the GCE (Advanced Level) English syllabus in Sri Lanka.

Her work has been translated into Sinhalese, Spanish and Swedish, and published in India, Bangladesh, Mexico, Sweden and the UK, as well as in online journals such as sugar mule and the open access journal 'postcolonial text'.