ABOUT
THE BOOK

Jean Arasanayagam was born into one of Sri Lanka’s minority communities, the “Dutch Burghers”, and married into another, the Tamil. In July 1983, the antagonism between Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority and its Sinhalese majority culminated in bloody riots. Her family became refugees. Jean bore a writer’s testimony of these events. She is an eminent short story writer. Her volumes of short stories include The Cry of the Kite and Peacocks and Dreams, which won her a prize for non-fiction in 1984 but was not published until twelve years later.