Jean
Arasanayagam

Jean Arasanayagam

(born Jean Solomons; 2 December 1931 – 30 July 2019)

was one of Sri Lanka’s most prolific and best-known contemporary writers of
English-language poetry and prose. Born to a Dutch Burgher family (of Dutch and indigenous
ancestry) in Sri Lanka, she graduated from the University of Peradeniya. Her husband is a Tamil,
a member of a minority ethnic group in Sri Lanka, and she and her family endured the dangers
and disruptions of a quarter-century of civil war between separatist Tamil forces and the Sri
Lankan government. Her writings are informed by a deep understanding of the nuances and
complexities of personal and family identities that reaches well beyond simple categories of race,
ethnicity, class, and gender. Arasanayagam attributes the experience of being confined in a
refugee camp in 1983 to her focus as a writer on the social and psychological issues that
accompany displacement and dispossession. She wrote numerous collections of poetry
and she was a lecturer for several years at the ISLE (Intercollegiate Sri Lanka Education)
Program offered by a consortium of colleges, including Bowdoin.