Yasmine bags Premchand Fellowship of India

Poet and novelist Yasmine Gooneratne has been awarded the prestigious Premchand Fellowship 2012 by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, India. Sahitya Akademi, India has instituted the Fellowship in the name of the great Indian writer on the occasion of the 125th birth anniversary to be annually offered to persons of eminence in the field of culture and literature from SAARC countries.

Prof. Yasmine Gooneratne

The Fellowship is three months and the recipient will be the guest of Sahitya Akademi during the period.

Born in Colombo, educated at the Universities of Ceylon and Cambridge, Emeritus Professor Yasmine Gooneratne has taught, researched and published in the fields of English and Commonwealth/Postcolonial Literature for 35 years. On her return from Cambridge with a Ph. D in English, she taught at the University of Ceylon in Peradeniya for 10 years (1962 - 1972) before accepting a senior position at Macquarie University in Australia, where she taught until her retirement from active teaching in 1999.

Her work as a writer and teacher has been recognised by the award of a Personal Chair in English as well as of Macquarie University's first higher doctoral degree (D.Litt.). She has been honoured in three countries by the conferment of the Order of Australia (AO), the Samvad India Foundation's Raja Rao Award, and the Sahityaratna ('Jewel of Literature') Award of Sri Lanka. Patron since 1990 of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, she is today the Director of The Guardian Angels, a literary editing service, and a member of the Australian Society of Authors and the English Writers' Cooperative of Sri Lanka.

All her novels (including the first, which won Australia's Marjorie Barnard Literary Prize for Fiction) have been shortlisted for international prizes, among them the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Dublin IMPAC International Prize. She has authored novels such as A Change of Skies, The Pleasures of Conquest and The Sweet and Simple Kind. She has also published four volumes of poetry.