Gratiaen Prize 2015 shortlists to be made public on 4 April

Friday, 25 March 2016 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

The shortlist for the Gratiaen Prize 2015 will be announced at an event on Monday 4 April, 6 p.m. at the British Council Library. All are invited to attend the announcement and listen to the reading of excerpts from the shortlisted entries.

The Gratiaen Prize was founded in 1993 by the Sri Lankan-born writer Michael Ondaatje after he won the Booker Prize for ‘The English Patient’. The Gratiaen Prize 2015 is the first to be presented under the Gratiaen Trust’s new partnership with Sarasavi Bookshops, who will be sponsoring the main prize awarding event to be held in May. The prize is awarded each year to the best submitted creative work in English, written by a Sri Lankan writer resident in Sri Lanka. Both published works and unpublished manuscripts are accepted as submissions.

The judges for the Gratiaen Prize 2015 are: Captain Elmo Jayawardena, retired airline captain, philanthropist and writer (chair); Tracy Holsinger, dramatist and speech and drama teacher and Dr. DinaliDevendra, former head of the Department of Language Studies at the Open University of Sri Lanka and Senior Lecturer in English.

The shortlisted writers for 2015 will learn of their selection for the first time at the event on Monday 4 April. Until this time, the decisions of the judges will be kept a closely guarded secret. At the event, excerpts of the shortlisted works will be read out and the judges will speak about how they chose the shortlist. This event, which is free and open to all, precedes the awarding of the prize to a final winner in May this year.

The shortlist event continues to be supported by The British Council, Sri Lanka as it has been since the inception of the prize.

For more information please contact Gratiaen Trust Secretary Minoli Malewana at: [email protected].