Yasmine Gooneratne

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

She was appointed Officer of The Order of Australia in 1990 by the Australian government for her distinguished services to literature and education.[7] In fact, she is the only Sri Lankan to have received this honour. She received a Ph.D for English literature from Cambridge University in 1962.[8][9]

Her international scholarship and pioneering work in the study and appreciation of postcolonial literature was described as being recognized with "Macquarie University's first higher doctoral degree (D.Litt.), the Order of Australia, and the Samvad India Foundation's Raja Rao Award for Literature which acknowledges authors who deal with the South Asian Diaspora in their literary work."[10] The Sunday Times of Sri Lanka wrote of Gooneratne:

When Saraswati did come into Yasmine’s life... she took the form of the goddess Tara. When The Samvad India Foundation singled out Yasmine for the Raja Rao award in 2002, they made her a gift of the beautiful little figurine. This international prize celebrates writers and scholars who have made an outstanding contribution to the literature of the South Asian diaspora, and the honour delighted Yasmine even as it took her by surprise. “I never expected that the Indian writing establishment would regard me in that light,” she says.[11]

Yasmine Gooneratne has been one of the leading contributors to the field of English literature in Sri Lanka, and Australia, as a creative writer, an academic and literary critic, and as a lecturer, particularly in the areas of eighteenth century literature, Jane Austen’s novels, and post-colonial literature.

Yasmine Gooneratne was the Founder and Director of the Centre for Post Colonial Literature and Language Studies at Macquarie University. She is the Patron of the JASA (Jane Austen Society of Australia), a position to which she was appointed in 1990.

Gooneratne founded the literary journal New Ceylon Writing in 1970, to publish the creative writing of Sri Lankan writers in English. 5 issues of this publication were printed between 1970 and 1983/4. These 5 printed issues were digitally scanned, called ‘The Quintet’, and made available as an open access resource on the New Ceylon Writing website, after the publication was brought online in 2016. Issues #6 and #7 are available on the website as digital documents.

Yasmine Gooneratne is also an acclaimed poet, with several collections of poetry published, including ‘The Lizard’s Cry’. Her poem, ‘Big Match 1983’, 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.[12]

Gooneratne has written two academic books for Cambridge University Press, on Jane Austen and Alexander Pope. She has also published 16 books with themes of post-colonial cultural tensions, both in creative fiction and literary criticism. Her first novel ’A Change of Skies’ (1991) won the 1991 Marjorie Barnard Literature Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 1991 Commonwealth Fiction Prize. Her second novel, ‘Pleasures Of Conquest’ was listed for The Commonwealth Fiction Award. In 2008, she was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award for her third novel ’The Sweet and Simple Kind’, and is to date the only Sri Lankan author to have been shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award.

In 1999, Gooneratne co-wrote, with her husband, ‘This Inscrutable Englishman’, a historical biography of Sir John D’Oyly, a civil servant in British Colonial Sri Lanka.

Gooneratne also edited Stories from Sri Lanka and Poems from India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore (1979), titles in the Writing in Asia Series published from 1966 to 1996.

Her fourth novel, ‘Rannygazoo’, was released online and is available on request.