Lakdhas Wikkramasinha

Bold and original poetry from a leading figure of an underrepresented anglophone tradition.

Lakdhas Wikkramasinha is one of the major Sri Lankan poets of the twentieth century. Fearlessly political, “powerful and angry” (as Michael Ondaatje calls him in his memoir Running in the Family), Wikkramasinha has influenced generations of writers in Sri Lanka. Yet his work, originally self-published in limited editions, has long been inaccessible. This new volume, edited by Aparna Halpé and Ondaatje, is the first to offer a comprehensive selection of Wikkramasinha’s English poetry drawn from the original sources, most of which have never been reprinted. It is also the first to contain a representative selection of the poetry that Wikkramasinha composed in Sinhala, now translated into English by Udaya Meddegama. An accomplished bilingual writer, deeply engaged with Sanskrit and Sinhalese traditions, Wikkramasinha also reveals himself to be a modernist shaped by his reading of Federico García Lorca and Osip Mandelstam, bringing a lyric style of great rhythmic force and imagistic compression to bear on his postcolonial present, as well as on the colonial and precolonial past.

Lakdhas Wikkramasinha (1941–1978) was a Sri Lankan poet, known for his experimental fusions of English and Sinhala. His work appeared in Madrona, Eastern Horizon, Outposts, University of Chicago Review, and other local and international journals. At age 36, he died by drowning.

Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan–born Canadian author, filmmaker, and editor. Ondaatje's novel The English Patient was a Booker Prize winner in 1992 and was awarded the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018. Ondaatje is also involved with Coach House Books, where he contributes as a poetry editor.

Aparna Halpé is a poet and a professor of English at Centennial College. Her work on contemporary postcolonial fiction has been published in numerous scholarly journals. She is the author of Precarious, a collection of poems.