Background
She is of Belgian and Sinhala ancestry and grew up in Kurunegala.
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Vivimarie Vanderpoorten
Edit ProfileEducation
She holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Ulster, United Kingdom, and is currently a senior lecturer in English language, literature and linguistics at the Open University of Sri Lanka.
Career
She lists Kamala Das, Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou among authors who have influenced her, and Moshin Hamid, Khaled Hosseini and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as contemporary writers that she reads. Vivimarie made an appearance at the Galle Literary Festival 2011, where she read poetry about her reaction to the killing of Lasantha Wickrematunge. Her work has been translated into Sinhalese, Spanish and Swedish, and published in India, Bangladesh, Mexico, Sweden and the United Kingdom, as well as in online journals such as sugar mule and the open access journal "postcolonial text".
Achievements
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Her book Nothing Prepares You won the 2007 Gratiaen Prize. She was also awarded the 2009 South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation Poetry Award in Delhi. She won the State Literary Award for English poetry (sharing the award with another Sri Lankan poet, Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe) in October 2011.
Politics
Her poetry has been called "gentle, reflective minimalism which touches the soul" by Doctor Sinharaja Tammita-Delgoda, the chairman of the panel of judges who awarded her the Gratiaen Prize Her second collection of poems, Stitch Your Eyelids Shut (2010) addresses issues that include feminism and the aftermath of Sri Lanka"s Civil War.
Awards
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Poetry Award in Delhi; Gratiaen Prize; State Literary Award
The State Literary Award is a set of annual literary prizes by the Government of Sri Lanka under several categories.; The Gratiaen Prize is an annual literary prize for best work of literary writing in English by a resident Sri Lankan.The State Literary Award is a set of annual literary prizes by the Government of Sri Lanka under several categories.; The Gratiaen Prize is an annual literary prize for best work of literary writing in English by a resident Sri Lankan.