Vivimarie Vanderpoorten

Who is Vivimarie Vanderpoorten?

Vivimarie VanderPoorten is a Sri Lankan poet. Her book Nothing Prepares You won the 2007 Gratiaen Prize. She was also awarded the 2009 SAARC Poetry Award in Delhi. She is of Belgian and Sinhala ancestry and grew up in Kurunegala. She holds a PhD from the University of Ulster, UK, and is currently a senior lecturer in English language, literature and linguistics at the Open University of Sri Lanka. Her poetry has been called "gentle, reflective minimalism which touches the soul" by Dr. 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 addresses issues that include feminism and the aftermath of Sri Lanka's Civil War. 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. She won the State Literary Award for English poetry in October 2011. Her work has been translated into Sinhalese, Spanish and Swedish, and published in India, Bangladesh, Mexico, Sweden and the UK, as well as in online journals such as sugar mule and the open access journal 'postcolonial text'.