Yasmine Gooneratne

Yasmine Gooneratne was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She obtained a BA (Hons) degree from the University of Ceylon and a PhD from Cambridge University, both in English Literature. In 1953, she won the Senkadagala Memorial Prize for Original Verse. Her professional activities include university professor, literary critic, editor, biographer, bibliographer, novelist, essayist, short story writer and poet.

Yasmine taught English literature at University of Ceylon from 1959-1972, and on emigrating to Australia in 1972 took up a position in the School of English and Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, which conferred its first higher doctoral degree, Doctor of Letters (DLitt), on her in 1981. Her novels A Change of Skies and The Pleasures of Conquest were shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1991 and 1995 respectively. In 2002, she received the Raja Rao Award from the Samvad India Foundation, an international prize instituted to honour writers and scholars who have made an outstanding contribution to the literature of the South Asian diaspora.

In December 1996, Yasmine donated her papers to the National Library of Australia as part of the Australian Manuscripts Archive.

Pleasures of Conquest. Vintage, 1996.
A Change of Skies. Picador, 1991.

Critical work:

Silence, Exile and Cunning : The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Orient Longman, 1983.
Diverse Inheritance: A Personal Perspective on Commonwealth Literature. Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English - Flinders University, 1980.