Lakdhas Wikkrama Sinha

Who is Lakdhas Wikkrama Sinha?

Lakdhas Wikkrama Sinha was a Sri Lankan poet who wrote in English and Sinhala. He was educated at St Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia, Sri Lanka, and studied law before becoming an English teacher. His interest in Sinhala literature led him to experiment with methods of fusing Western and South Asian traditions creatively in his own writing.

A bilingual poet, whose career ended prematurely with his death by drowning, Wikkrama Sinha's first book of verse, Lustre: Poems, was written entirely in English in the contrary spirit of one who, finding himself constrained by his education to write in the language of ‘the most despicable people on earth’, had set himself to write as anarchically as possible. This mood did not last. His work appeared in Madrona, Eastern Horizon, New Ceylon Writing, Outposts, University of Chicago Review, and other local and international journals, and was published privately by him in Janakiharana and Other Poems, Fifteen Poems, and Nossa Senhora dos Chingalas, O Regal Blood, and The Grasshopper Gleaming. In honour of a Sri Lankan artist of a previous generation, Wikkramasinha edited and privately published Twelve Poems to Justin Daraniyagala 1903 –67.